


After the Fire, But Before the Flood

by adlyb



Series: After the Fire, But Before the Flood [1]
Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Post-Apocalypse, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-06
Updated: 2015-04-06
Packaged: 2018-03-21 12:18:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 20
Words: 58,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3692022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adlyb/pseuds/adlyb
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a post-apocalyptic world, Elena and Klaus learn to symbiote.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story is told non-chronologically. For future reference: If the first sentence of a scene is in italics, that means that that's a flashback scene explaining how events have led Klaus and Elena to where they are. These are told non-chronologically. If the entire scene is in italics, then that's referring to a specific moment that I'll be revisiting a few times (it's important). If the scene starts in normal font, then that's the "present" time line.

  


* * *

 

_When everything is said and done and dead, Elena and Klaus are the only two left standing._

_She sees him across the field, a figure emerging from the pre-dawn mists like a primordial battle god, daubed in the blood of his enemies._

_He draws nearer as he stoops to examine the rent bodies strewn across the blood-soaked earth._

_Elena herself would be unable to pry her own eyes from the two at her feet, were the instinctive fear she felt at his mere presence not keeping her attention riveted to the angelically beautiful demon before her._

_Klaus pauses on the last of the bodies longer than he did on all the rest. It's not regret that plays across his features, but perhaps the feeling is somewhere in that family. He reaches out and freezes a hair's breadth from the face. His arm goes slack and drops across his knees as he continues to stare._

_Finally, he abandons the corpse and, for the first time, addresses Elena. "How is it," he drawls with faint reproach, "that in all this,_ you _survive?"_

_The hand curling in the mud next to her ankles draws her attention. She kneels down next to it, ghosting her fingers just above the limb. She memorizes its features, the almond shape of the nails, the exact webbing of skin between the digits._

_A shadow blocks the light._

_Hazy as the morning sun is, she can no longer make out the hand's features with Klaus's dark silhouette looming over it._

_Elena glances up into her old nightmare's eyes, notices the way the irises swim like golden islands in a swamp of black._

_There's no clear answer to his question. Before, perhaps she could have told him_ , My friends protect me _. But now…_

" _Luck, I guess."_

_She holds his gaze for a long minute before he slowly nods._

_He turns to leave but pauses, as though reconsidering. He looks back at the tableau she presents, and sighs. "It's a pity that you didn't stay dead like a good girl. I wouldn't have had to go through all this trouble that way."_

" _I didn't think—" she begins._

" _You're a lucky girl, Elena. Let's just leave it at that."_

_This time, when he turns away, he makes no indication that he ever intends to look back._

_Elena scrambles to her feet._

" _Wait."_

 

* * *

 

"Do you think of them ever?" she asks him one morning in lieu of nothing, except the tracery of blond hairs spiderwebbing across his back.

The spread of sunlight across their bed tells her it's past midmorning. Not that time is even relevant anymore.

"Of whom?" he asks, though they both know he asks only to be a bother. His voice is slightly muffled by a pillow.

Elena digs her nail a little into his shoulder, watches as the bloody crescent left by her thumb knits itself into clean white flesh.

Klaus sighs and grabs her before rolling them over. His hips sink against hers, momentarily distracting her from the morning's wash of memories.

He slinks down her body, leaving open mouth kisses from the tip of her chin down the swell of her right breast. From there, he maps a perfect meridian past her navel to the hot flesh of her inner thigh.

She jumps when he nips her just _there_.

As Klaus begins peeling the clothes from her limbs, Elena forgets about her question altogether.

It can wait, as everything does these days.

 

* * *

 

As a girl, Elena's ideas on love glittered like gemstones in her mind's eye—She did not have a particular prince yet, but when he came, she knew she would love him—and stay with him. _Always_. And she would have what her mother had with her father.

Even as a staggering, wild-hearted sixteen year old, she still held those convictions safe, locked up in the most secret part of her. She knew she was just waiting for the right boy to bring them out.

Well, the right boy turned out to be a _vampire_.

But after everything that had happened in the last year?

She took it in stride with disturbing ease.

And Stefan was _everything_.

Which leaves her with the difficult question— _What does that make Klaus?_

 

* * *

 

_Contrary to everyone's fears, the world doesn't end when the sacrifice goes down and not a single one of them is able to stop it. Similarly, it doesn't end when Tyler bites Damon, or when Stefan leaves with Klaus, or even when Jeremy_ dies, again _, and starts seeing ghosts._

_The world ends when Elena awakens Elijah in a vain attempt to find Stefan, and Elijah, in turn, awakens his family._

_Awakening Elijah had always been a bad idea—and it had always served her purposes when she brought it to fruition._

_Except this time, Elijah's agenda doesn't swing anywhere near hers, and although he looks at her with something akin to awe when he gasps life back into his lungs and sees her leaning over him, his family comes first._

" _Elena?" Caroline calls from the door of the warehouse where she's keeping watch. "Did it work? Are my vampire-best-friend-accomplice duties complete?"_

_Elijah seems to answer the question for her when he sits up and turns to glance at Caroline, then at the wreck the two of them have made while searching through boxes to find him._

_As he swings his legs out of the crate, Elena chooses to remind him, "You owe me."_

_He plucks at his suit. "What for?"_

" _Remember that whole—_ You go through with the sacrifice, I'll kill Klaus _— deal we had? I got the post-mortem Cliff's notes from Damon. You betrayed me, and now Klaus has Stefan, so it's really your responsibility to help me find him." She takes a calming breath. "Also? I'm getting tired of pulling that dagger out of you."_

_He cocks his head to the side as he considers her. At length, he responds, "Alright. But know this, Elena," he continues as he stalks toward her. "I don't regret my actions. If I had to do it all again, I_ would _do it all again. My allegiance is to my family." His face softens, ever so slightly, as he steps close enough for her to feel the heat radiating off of his skin. He seems to be weighing his words carefully, because finally he admits, "I never meant to hurt you, Elena."_

" _I believe you."_

_She feels like there is something more he wants to say, something else he wants to do._

_The moment passes._

_Caroline clears her throat and gestures at her watch. "If we're here much longer, Damon's going to get suspicious, and_ no way _am I gonna be the one dealing_ with that _when I get home. So… are we done here?"_

" _Not quite."_

_Faster than Elena's eyes can track, Elijah slips past her. He stands in front of a stack of shipping crates, identical to the one he rested in, and starts pulling them out._

" _What are you doing?" Elena asks._

" _Reviving my family."_

" _Don't you think that's a bad idea right now? With Klaus on the loose? Didn't you tell me he's unstoppable now that he's broken the curse?"_

" _That's exactly why we need them," he tells her as he pulls the first dagger free. "Trust me. This is best."_

_She does. It isn't._

 

* * *

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

* * *

 

_For a short while, Elijah's promise seems true._

After all the confusion about Elena's identity is cleared up, and Elijah's family is caught up on the year and recent events (and oh, that's fun), Elena and Caroline return to Mystic Falls.

At first, the Originals all agree Klaus must be hunted and destroyed. They vow to use every resource, every bloodline of witches pledged into their service centuries ago, to do it.

There is, of course, a small caveat to their assistance—it seems that a world where the Original Family remains irrelevant to almost all vampires is a world that the Original Family cannot endure.

Soon after that, the in-fighting starts.

Within the week, this family Elijah has risked everything to reunite is at each others' throats. None can agree on a course of action, and past blames still brew in their hearts.

_And when all is said and done..._

 

* * *

 

" _Wait."_

_She launches herself forward, but trips on the arm that had been the focus of her impassioned study just a moment ago._

_He does not respond to her words, other than to pause._

_Elena herself couldn't begin to tell him what it is she wants from him. What could she want? Isn't all of this his fault, for taking Stefan in the first place? No, it's_ your _fault, she reminds herself. You're the one who couldn't leave Elijah well enough alone._

_Her eyes skitter to his ashy remains where Klaus had lingered so long._

_Finally, she breathes, "I don't know where to go."_

_His shoulders tense, slightly before he answers, "Not my problem, sweetheart."_

_Elena bites her tongue when the ground beneath her feet splits in two, swallowing the corpses at her feet._

_She expects this to be the end—except Klaus saves her._

_He grabs her by the forearm and hauls her against him._

_Sense memory of_ that night _floods her._

_She struggles._

" _Put me down, put me down, put me down." For a brief moment, the earth jounces toward her before Klaus pulls her back._

_Stefan and Damon have disappeared under that earth, and she should go to them—_

" _Elena, dear, I'm going to think twice about rescuing you next time if you scratch my face with all of this flailing."_

 

* * *

 

Outside, Elena can hear the cathedral bells tolling the hour. She wonders how long until the computer activating the bells every hour fails, and the sound becomes another thing forgotten.

Klaus has been gone a few hours now.

According to him, they are somewhere in Northern Spain—Basque Country—but she wouldn't be able to tell if he were lying to her. The Atlantic has crept up and submerged the cities to the south—Seville, Barcelona, Toledo and Madrid—all those places she wanted to go and now would probably never see.

_Unless_.

The thought makes her frown a little, because it wasn't so long ago that she thought she'd never even see her eighteenth birthday.

Wherever they are, the house Klaus has chosen sits high against the mountains, providing Elena with a vista of the ocean lapping against rolling hills that Klaus tells her were fat with grazing sheep and cattle last time he was here. Further in the distance, she can see the tips of the medieval Cathedral peeking through the water, bells ropes not yet rotten from the damp and the sea salt.

The bell tolls nine more times before Klaus returns. He isn't scowling, precisely, but Elena can tell from the unstained white of his shirt that he didn't get what he wanted.

Perfunctorily, she sweeps her hair aside for him and bears her neck.

 

* * *

 

_The witches, ultimately, are probably the ones at fault for breaking the world._

When the Originals turn on each other and war breaks out amongst the factions, they use the witches they had pledged would help destroy Klaus against each other.

Bonnie disappears, and Elena and Jeremy can only guess which Original has her in his army.

There are just too many witches, drawing on the stars and moon and sun and sapping all of the light and heat from the heavens.

The earth heaves and shudders, the sea rolls high over the coastline and drowns the great cities, and fires light the night sky like burnished jewels.

A brand-new fault line splits Mystic Falls down the middle. It's new, and inexplicable by science, and, like a shark swimming in the depths of the ocean, undetected until an earthquake rips the town apart while everyone is sleeping.

Elena is with Damon when it happens, taking sullen tequila shots and trying to come up with a plan to find Bonnie.

He shelters her, shielding her from the falling ceiling beams and the rain of crashing plaster with his own body.

Jeremy had left not ten minutes earlier.

They find his car on the side of the road, flipped and wrapped around a tree.

Elena stumbles forward, claws at the doors.

Damon has to rip them open for her, the warped metal coming away from the frame like tissue wrapping.

Inside, Jeremy's neck is twisted at a vicious angle, his eyes like black glass.

"He'll wake up, though," Elena says, voice shivering through the octaves. "The witches caused this earthquake," she mumbles as she searches for the ring on his finger. "That makes it supernatural. He'll wake up."

Slowly, Damon shakes his head. "I don't think you need to see this, Elena." He pulls her against him and threads his hands through her hair.

"He'll wake up." She repeats. "I know it. The witches…"

Damon buries Jeremy the next day.

 

* * *

 

_At some point, one of Elijah's brothers gets it in his head that_ Elena _, the_ doppelganger, _is the key to his brother's submission._

Unfortunately, he is right.

Damon comes for her, of course.

Before he can break her free, Stefan arrives on scene.

He's nothing like she remembers, but still everything she wants. His time away has slashed hard lines into his face, added a cruel twist to his mouth. But when he spots her, underneath it all, she still sees love.

Around them, Originals and witches and subordinate vampires battle. Elijah's forces pull madly against those of his brother's in an unwinnable stale mate.

Stefan weaves through the chaos, and, against the odds, wrests her from the vampires guarding her.

Elena flings herself against him, unheeding of the blood dried on his chin, uncaring of the veins that sizzle under his eyes when she draws too near.

After she is really certain he is there, but before she notices that she has begun to weep, she asks, "Stefan, how did you get here? I thought you were with Klaus—"

He tenses against her and she pulls away from the embrace to look behind her.

"Hello, brother," Damon murmurs as he ghosts in next to them. His voice echoes like a memory she never knew she had.

Stefan nods in his brother's direction. Something passes between them, wordlessly, because the brothers are on her then, pressing her between them as they run.

They are going too fast for Elena's human brain to process.

She imagines what tonight will be like—her mind turns to what they will say when they are tucked safe inside of the Boarding House, to all the questions she will have for Stefan and all of the guilt she'll simply have to push aside concerning what she has been up to with Damon. Maybe it will all work itself out. Deep inside of her, Elena has the sense that _this is right_. Damon's arms on one side, Stefan's on the other. _It's okay to love them both_. Now that she _has_ them both, she turns the thought over carefully in her mind. Maybe—

Damon lets go of her arm, and Stefan nearly trips when he has to readjust.

Elena glances down and realizes.

Damon's skin has turned a familiar shade of gray and she knows, before she ever sees the dark wood protruding from his ribcage.

Stefan's mouth hangs open as he stares at his brother. He leaves her, then, and sinks to his knees beside his brother's corpse.

"Stefan," she calls, before realizing her voice has no strength. She tries again and latches onto his arm. "Stefan, we need to leave. _Now_."

He turns to look at her.

His expression unhinges her soul.

A stray vampire jams a stake through Stefan's heart, and he dies with that look frozen on his features.

 

* * *

 

It wasn't always like this.

The thought swims like a dizzy fish through Elena's mind as Klaus growls against her throat.

She hopes he'll finish soon. She's beginning to see black around the edges of her vision.

Just as she thinks she'll probably swoon, he pulls back and swings her up, bridal style, into his arms. His lips are already on hers as he puts her down and presses her against the nearest flat surface—the wall, this time.

She can taste herself on his lips. The taste reminds her of a dirty penny, and something else, something older and more primal lurking underneath the haze of flavor. She licks into his mouth, searching for more so she can figure out what she senses.

He chuckles as he pulls away and begins nosing her jawline. "Sometimes, I think you'd make a very interesting vampire." He breathes the words into her skin, where they sit until they sound like truth.

She stiffens a little beneath him, as she always does when he brings this up, and wills her muscles to relax. It's out of her hands. They both know he'll get his way, ultimately, whatever that turns out to be.

Deliberately, Elena wraps her legs around Klaus's waist and arches against him.

He adjusts easily, taking her weight and pulling at her clothes almost like she's a doll.

Except when he looks at her, she sees something that tells her otherwise. She hasn't pieced together what that _otherwise_ entails yet, but give her time and she'll have an answer.

His hands distract her from the thought as he pushes past her panties and runs a thumb against her slit.

She bites back the whimper that wants to climb out of her throat, because she won't give him that satisfaction this early in the day.

"Now, now, Elena," he chides as he rubs the rough pad of his thumb against her clit. "Let's not be mulish." He nips at the ragged flesh edging his bite. When he speaks, his voice is a husky whisper. "What say you, my lovely? Will you scream for me? Or if not with a bang, then with a whimper?"

She bucks against him as he increases his tempo. She holds his gaze as she loops her arms behind his head and draws him closer.

He treats her to a vicious grin, all sharp teeth and predatory yellow eyes.

In her mind's eye, she sees a different Klaus. The vision blurs with the lover in her arms, overlays his features like a mirage. If she focuses, Elena can see this increasingly familiar vision of him as clear as any memory. There's something almost soft about the curve of his mouth, something tragic about the throb of life beneath his skin—

"Elena, love, let's hear some noise, hmm?"

His voice breaks the spell.

"Hmm, my dear? How does that sound?" He dips a finger inside of her as he speaks. Simultaneously, he begins navigating his way from her neck to her breast, his lips leaving a trail of red stains as he presses wet, open-mouth kisses against her skin.

Blood throbs between her legs, pooling her desire in a damp puddle that has Klaus giving her a nasty little smile.

Finally, she moans. It's a small thing, just a low hitch in her throat, but he hears it just the same.

He curls his fingers just _there_ and that's it, this is all she needs, all she has, as she clings to his shoulders and rides out her pleasure.

Things get hazy from there—she pulls his shirt up and over his head and fumbles with his belt, and, as best as she can tell, he thinks it's all sort of a good joke, the way he admitted not too long ago that he thought dedicating _Teen Angel_ to her at the 60s dance was funny.

Whatever. She doesn't care. Especially when his smile slips and hunger replaces the trace of humor in his eyes as he flips her dress up and twists her panties off.

It's in the moment that he finally slams inside of her, too fast and too hard and just right, that she remembers Elena Gilbert. That once upon a time, she loved a boy, and now she loves a monster.

 

* * *

 

_The girl has nothing to offer him._

If anything, he should extinguish her for what she had unleashed on his yet unravished world—it was supposed to be _he_ that drank the rivers dry of blood, he who tore the beating hearts from men and laughed— But it was all supposed to be in good time. There would be no fun in eternity as the single most powerful being in all the world if there were no world left to conquer.

This girl has ruined everything, he told himself as he pulled her from the wreckage of the battle field. After the sacrifice, she had nothing left to offer him. Nothing except the face of a Petrova.

In the burgeoning morning light, as the sun gilt her hair like honey and the blood trickled down her face, she could almost be…

Yes. Perhaps she had enough to offer him after all.

 

* * *

 


	3. Chapter 3

* * *

 

 

" _Elena, dear, I'm going to think twice about rescuing you next time if you scratch my face with all of this flailing."_

The words do their trick, like they have a magic all their own.

_Maybe they do._

She stills, _finally_ , and sags in his arms.

All the better, because if she keeps this up he'll probably change his mind again and leave her behind.

And yet.

He remembers this girl. A year's time has not dulled the memory of her in his arms, heart fluttering like a bird's as he clasped his teeth against her nape.

True, he had just an hour ago mistaken her for Katerina when he had glimpsed her across the foggy battlefield. Unsurprising, what with her hair curling in the morning damp and blood splattering her throat like a ruby collar.

The girl's stubborn refusal to run had quickly dispelled him of the notion.

Finding her alive this morning had been a bit of a surprise and yet had seemed like an _inevitability_.

That there would be a Petrova, here, at the site of this his family's last sordid conflict—

To spend a thousand years anticipating a single girl, to kill her and to find her again, _human_ —

" _Fate_ ," he breathes as he traces the milky white twin scars marking her neck. Klaus leans forward until he can taste the sweat and dirt and blood on her throat.

Elena twists in his arms and tips her chin up to pierce him with those wide, dark eyes. "I'm too tired for vampire psycho-babble. Can we just get on with whatever-this-is?"

Klaus smiles a little. "If I'm not mistaken, you're the one who called out to _me_. It's too late to sing a different tune."

"I changed my mind."

Petrova women are always more alike than they would like to think.

He lets her go and steps back a tick. His feet sink into mud. For the first time he looks at where he has brought her—the beginnings of a marsh, it would appear, only a few miles from the site of the earthquake that had rid him of the bodies of his family forever.

"How extraordinary it is to be a stranger to the geography one committed to memory over a millennium ago," he murmurs as he kneels to inspect the unfamiliar coast.

The girl wraps her arms around her waist and shivers.

For the first time he notices she's wearing only a pair of pajamas—as though she were taken from her bed. Lust lurches through him at the sight of her bare legs glowing with youthful health, filthy as they are from the night's activities.

He stands, brushing brackish water off the backs of his hands as he slinks towards his quarry.

The girl exhibits an exciting desire to run from him. She fumbles away, all jumping pulse and shallow breaths.

"Elena, why did you ask me to wait?" He asks the question partially to distract himself from his growing desire to take the girl in the mud. The other part of him wants to know if he can ever possess her the way he finds himself wishing to.

She freezes, the rabbit caught in the snare.

Elena averts her eyes before she answers, voice small as a child's, "Because I didn't know… Because you're the only one who can tell me—" She pushes the hair out of her face and behind her ears in a way that suggests habit. She finally raises her eyes. "What's going to happen, now that the others are—"

He watches in fascination as her throat hitches, the muscles bobbing against her tracheal cartilage. His mouth waters a little as he answers, eyes unable to move from her those fascinating reminders from their last encounter, "Dead?"

"Yes."

"It'll take a while before the world resettles. I suppose I'll have to pay a visit to most of the witches involved in this… _dispute_." He shows his teeth as the words roll off his tongue, so she gets his meaning.

"You're going to kill them?"

"Oh, not all of them. I like to always have a coterie of witches on hand, should any need arise."

"Like the appearance of the doppelganger."

" _Exactly._ "

"So, what then? After however long, the continents stop crashing into each other and the sea levels stabilize and the sun starts to feel warm again?"

"Eventually, I imagine."

Klaus doubts she's even aware of it, but she's been shifting closer to him with every word, until she's as close as when they started this dance.

"How long, do you think? Before things go back to how they were…?" Her own words make her blanch. Likely she's having melodramatic and, knowing her, very grave thoughts about her dead loved ones.

He _does_ regret Stefan's death; he doubts he'll find such exquisite talent in another vampire in any of the near-approaching centuries. Especially with the dearth of vampires this little melee has produced. Perhaps he can understand the sour twist in Elena's mouth if she is, in fact, thinking of Stefan (though, he suspects the crazy, impulsive vampire in love with his brother's girl isn't too far behind in her thoughts).

Reflecting on the loss gives him an idea.

"How long?" Elena prods. "How long until things are normal again?"

"My, we've become quite brazen in a mere ten minutes time," he mocks her.

She's the very vision of Tatia when she raises her chin and crosses her arms under her breasts.

"So what if I am? I asked you a question."

He chuckles. "A few centuries, I would guess. Perhaps more, perhaps less. Depends on what the witches do to set things right. I very much doubt it will matter to the two of us, though."

He gets the reaction he had hoped for.

Elena's brow scrunches as she ponders his words. When his meaning begins to sink in, she splutters incoherently, backing away. "No. _No_. That's not—I didn't mean— _No._ "

" _Yes_ , Elena."

"I'd rather die."

His impulse is to tell her _suit yourself_ , but this girl's repeated entanglement with his destiny compels him to speak otherwise.

"Later, when the time is right, then I may just consider it. But for now, my lovely Elena, my ravishing devastator of worlds and enchanting breaker of dreams, immortal and otherwise, I would like you to come with me." He holds out his hand, and if the gesture is a deliberate allusion to that glorious full moon's evening a year ago, he doesn't say anything to destroy the spell it seems to cast on her.

"You want me to come with you?"

"Yes."

"You're not going to kill me?"

"I've already done that once. I bore easily of doing the same thing twice."

"Are you going to…" She chews on the insides of her cheek as though the words in her mouth are a heretofore-undiscovered animal. "Are you going to protect me?"

He smiles a little. "That seems to be an incidental of what I am proposing."

"Klaus—"

"Yes. I will _protect_ you. From the 'cataracts and hurricanoes,' from the 'sulph'rous and thought-executing fires,' I will protect you." He runs his tongue over his teeth as he bends so that their faces are inches apart. "And I think it goes without saying what I shall do to any vampire that attempts to take you from me."

"Why are you doing all of this? Is it because I look like a Petrova?"

"Of course."

 

* * *

 


	4. Chapter 4

* * *

 

 

_Klaus holds his hand out, and if his mouth weren't so much like a red maw and his eyes didn't glint like the devil's, Elena thinks he might've passed for a prince._

Elena doubts she truly has a choice, beyond this one small moment when she can either take his hand and go with him willingly, or resist him, futile though it will be. She's already played out both scenarios, not too long ago. Either one will be like retracing the steps to a familiar dance.

She raises her head and looks him in the eyes as if she feels the confidence she has become an expert at demonstrating. Before she can make a choice, she needs to know, "Why are you doing this?"

Somewhere deep inside of her, she knows there is another question that needs to be asked. She just can't find it. Sometime between finally, finally having both Stefan and Damon in her heart's grasp and watching the earth consume their pallid bodies, or possibly sometime between facing the man who has, time and again, brought her nothing but misery and realizing that he has offered her a place by his side, she thinks she has lost sight of the one thing that must always define her.

He stands before her quoting—what? _Shakespeare?_ As if that will win her.

All she needs is honesty.

Unbidden, the question unfurls in her mind.

"Is it because I look like a Petrova?"

His face sharpens infinitesimally. If she had not been watching, she may not have seen it at all. His jaws crack open as he imbues his words with the ripe suspense they perhaps deserve.

"Of course."

_All she needs is honesty._

She takes his hand.

Klaus smiles as he wraps his fingers around her knucklebones and draws her toward him. "There now," he murmurs. "That wasn't so bad."

She swallows around the growing lump in her throat as he fits her against him and runs his thumb over her cheek.

"Did you know the original Petrova girl? The one who looked like me?" she blurts before she can seal the words inside of her.

His thumb stops.

Klaus's voice falls flat as he states, "You mean Tatia."

"Tatia?" she repeats. Elena reflects on all the months leading up to her death, and realizes she has never once questioned the identity of the first girl to bear her face. It had always been about Katherine, Katherine, Katherine. The terrible thought that that previously nameless girl was the only one whose face wasn't a contrivance of fate and magic flits through her mind before she pushes it away. Elena refocuses. Swishes the taste of that name around in her mouth. "Tatia," she presses. "Did you know her?"

"Yes."

"And?"

"Irrelevant."

She tries to pull back, but finds he has sealed his fingers around the fine tracery of bone keeping her skull intact. "You just told me the only reason you're even interested in me is because I look like her. I think it's in my rights to know why."

"I knew her. She died. The end."

Elena wants to say, ' _Yeah, I got the memo,'_ but the words are lost because before she can voice them, he kisses her.

It's not the sort of kiss she expects. In fact, it's patently unlike any other first kiss she's ever experienced.

The kiss itself is neither tender nor rough. If anything, it's a little bit emotionless and Elena gets the strong impression it's more to shut her up than anything else. The technique is good though— _very good_ —and she's so bewildered that it's easy to go numb and just respond.

Lurking below the surface, the old Elena Gilbert (the one that could _unhinge her jaw like a snake to consume alcohol_ ) still lingers in bits and pieces. It's that girl Elena resurrects for this kiss.

And what a kiss it turns out to be.

Elena snags her hands in his shirt, unmindful of the gore soaking through the weave, and opens her mouth against his.

He doesn't pause, precisely, as he moves his hands from her face to her arms. Yet there is a sort of thoughtful delay, as though she has managed to surprise him.

Elena takes the opportunity to draw his lower lip between her teeth. The phrase _slippery slope_ comes to mind as she nips him with a canine and little beads of blood bloom against her tongue.

She feels more than hears the snarl that forms against her open mouth as his lips pull away from his teeth and his fingers spasm possessively around her arms.

In the morning, she suspects she'll find bruises tattooed into her flesh.

Events rocket out of her control, and she wonders why she ever thought she had any to begin with.

Klaus whips her sleep-tank over her head. Before the chill air can settle onto her skin, and _way_ before she registers that he's stripping her down, his hands settle over the weight of her breasts, palming them with uncomfortable familiarity. He runs a thumb over one hardening nipple and smirks when she shudders in his arms. With the other hand, he traces the soft flesh that stretches high over her ribs, just below her other breast.

It's an erogenous zone she hadn't even been aware of before this moment and she cannot resist leaning into him as he begins tracing a slow pattern toward her hip.

"I thought you'd like that," he tells her with what could almost be called a wink.

"How?" The word comes out huskier than she'd anticipated and she sort of wants to curl into a ball and die when she hears the want in it.

He looks like he's going to say something, but then changes his mind. Instead, he cocks his head to the side and drawls, with a little too much amusement, "I'm quite a lady-killer, you know."

More than anything, she'd like to rear back and slap that grin off his face.

If this had been Damon, she would have already tried. And _oh_ , she realizes that she'd never slap Damon again, or that he'd never make her cry or that he'd never make her laugh or tell her in his frightening, _wonderful_ way that he loved her ever, ever again.

It's enough for Elena to remember who she's with, and why.

"Let me go."

He doesn't seem to hear her. Instead, he swoops in toward her neck, sucking a little too hard on her pulse point as his hands toy with the hem of her sleep-shorts.

He's good. Between his warm lips and his rough fingers, Elena can barely remember her own name, let alone the despair that's starting to seep into her veins. That's probably the point.

"Please, let me go."

"Is that what you want? You seem to be enjoying this quite a bit." His fingers rub circles against the arch of her pelvic bone as he speaks. With each pass, they ease a little bit lower, past her shorts, until he's found his way past her underwear and is tracing a circle around her clit. "Actions speak louder than words, Elena." As he speaks, he finally touches her just _there_.

Elena's entire body shakes as he taps against the nerve bundle. She can't stop herself from moaning, and she can't dissuade herself from bucking against his hand.

She hates that she's this weak. She hates that it's him she's wrapping her arms around, that he's the one slowly, _slowly_ , scissoring his fingers inside of her.

_One more time._ She has the strength to try one more time.

"Klaus, let me go." The words, this time, are strong, clear, and she _refuses_ to let Klaus ignore her.

She reaches up and lays her palm against the side of his face so that he will look at her.

To her dismay, his eyes have turned an alarming shade of yellow and his teeth have begun to elongate.

So this is what she died for.

Tentatively, she reaches her free hand toward the other side of his face and brushes the tips of her fingers against the smooth skin under his eyes, the cruel curvature of his fangs.

Part of her is sure she's taking her life in her hands by venturing this sort of familiarity with such an unknowable monster. The other part of her is aware that he's knuckles-deep inside of her and how much more familiar can she really get?

He holds very, very still as she peruses the new details of his face.

Finally, she looks back into his eyes, only to see that they are clearing into a stormy blue.

He looks at her like he's seeing _more_ than just Elena Gilbert, _more_ than just the doppelganger with the magic sacrificial blood. He looks at her like he's never seen her before, like she's the last thing keeping him rooted to this reality, and if she disappeared, he would come unhinged from the world.

Elena realizes with a start that, with everyone they know dead, and everything they know warped beyond recognition, this might be true. She is just as much the last reminder of someplace like home for him as he is for her.

Something passes between them then.

Elena Gilbert doesn't believe she's articulate enough to accurately describe with words the sensation of looking into this thousand-year-old creature's (man's?) eyes and seeing her own emotions reflected back at her.

What she can say is that it is enough to make her change her mind— _for the last time_ —and find out what he has to offer.

 

* * *

 

On days like this, he almost regrets taking Elena with him.

He stands at the window facing the Basque cathedral. He can smell the remnants of the sun on her skin on the wooden window frame, as though she stood in this spot for hours. Was she waiting for him? Was she afraid? Nervous? Bored? None of those things linger in her scent; just the sun, and the hint of what her blood might taste like.

Across the room, Elena stirs in her sleep. Her hair slips from around her neck, bearing his bite mark to the moonlight.

He'd been careful not to drain her too far, though he'd been sorely tempted.

The problem, Klaus is beginning to think, is that his initial estimations for restabilization were a tad optimistic.

True, only a few years have passed since he gave Elena that rough figure of a few centuries, so theoretically it should be too early to tell, but factors other than just the natural settling of the seismic plates have began to make themselves known.

Namely, there just aren't enough people to eat.

He's sure Elena must be aware of this on some level. She's a smart girl, smart enough to notice that he's been returning to her without satiating his bloodlust more and more often.

They would have to move to better hunting grounds tomorrow. Where those are, he isn't entirely certain.

Which leads him back to his original thoughts—he's beginning to reconsider the situation with his companion.

He's not entirely sure how much longer he can keep them both alive, as things stand.

Elena requires food and clean water, of which there is precious little left.

He can tell from her distant gaze and weakening blood that she's beginning to diminish. He will likely kill her by accident very soon if he keeps feeding from her. It would have been less troublesome to abandon her to the elements that blood-foggy morning, before he'd grown… _attached_.

Klaus follows the stream of moonlight from the window to their bed.

Even now, as he contemplates her death, she draws him.

He settles beside her and, so close, cannot resist touching her.

Instinctively, the girl nuzzles into his hand as he strokes the angle of her cheekbones.

Perhaps it would be best to kill her now. Snap her neck while she sleeps and sip the remaining blood from her body while it still smells of their lovemaking.

But then, he's known this face a thousand years. It's a difficult thing, to think this may be the last time he'll look upon it.

Another option presents itself. He could always turn her. The idea is hardly a new one; just that afternoon he had toyed with the notion. And what a lovely vampire she would make. Except—

He had begun killing other vampires on site in order to winnow out the hunting-competition before his family's bodies had even been a day in the ground.

Adding Elena to the mix would fix nothing at all.

At best, he could change her as a means of preserving her. He could lock her up, force her into desiccation until the humans rebred the species enough to support the two of them—

No. That wouldn't do either. Petrova that she is, she would escape, of that he is certain, and she would run so fast and so far he would never find her. After all, he spent five-hundred years searching for the last woman to wear that beguiling face. From the vantage point of hind-sight, he suspects that he was dearly lucky to have found Katerina at all.

Klaus lays his hand against her slender neck.

Elena shifts in her sleep, her mouth dropping open as she frets against the bedsheets. She begins to talk in her sleep, as she often does after he feeds from her. The girl's muddled sentences spill into the night, doubtless a reflection of the nightmare he can see unfolding across the canvas of her face. She speaks almost too quietly even for him to hear.

Her eyes open mid-dream.

Elena holds onto his wrist as she tries to sit up.

Klaus can see, from the mute color of her eyes, that she is not truly awake. He studies her lips, straining to hear her even as he flexes his hand around her jugular.

Eventually, he makes out a word, delivered in a rustling cadence he has not heard in a millennium. He hears—

"Niklaus."

He drops her like she's a live coal.

For a few seconds, she stares at him, eyes large and dark and terrible as he remembers.

He cannot bring himself to look away.

The moment passes. Elena slumps and falls back to sleep, as though nothing had ever occurred.

Uncomfortable sitting too close to her, unable to take his eyes from her, Klaus takes a seat in the arm-chair facing the bed and watches her.

The moon reaches its zenith, descends toward the horizon, only to be replaced by the sun, and still he watches her.

Elena stirs around eight o'clock. She stretches like a cat before sitting up and looking for him.

"What are you doing all the way over there?" she asks, patting the bed beside her. "I want you here."

Warily, he approaches her.

She climbs out of the bedding and onto her knees, reaches for him as soon as he is close enough. Nothing about her indicates she recalls anything about the night before.

The scent of her, hot skin and undiluted arousal, diverts his attention.

Klaus pushes her back and pins her to the bed. He thrusts a knee between her pretty legs and kisses the plump swell of breast that comes precariously close to slipping out of her camisole.

He forgets about everything except the girl in front of him.

 

* * *

 


	5. Chapter 5

* * *

 

 

_The sun finally reaches its meridian as Klaus runs her toward her future._

Her surroundings speed past too quickly for Elena to comprehend them, but she can tell from the pattern of light and shadow that they are racing through a forest, over an abandoned highway, through a city. The kaleidoscope of images makes her want to heave her stomach onto the ground. The urge to close her eyes and bury her head against Klaus's sternum is strong, but she cannot bring herself to take her eyes off of him, lest he press the advantage.

With nothing else to steady her careening senses, she focuses on Klaus himself.

Now that the sun has come up fully over the trees, she can see the way the light flecks his skin with shimmering gold, the way the stubble roughening his chin fails to make his face seem any less boyish.

For a heart-stopping second, his eyes slide from the path ahead of them to her face.

The sensation reminds her of the jaguar at the zoo. Caged or not, at the end of the day, it was still the predator and she the prey.

Elena shutters and feels Klaus's hold on her tighten.

Part of her worries, because she's not entirely uncomfortable with the embrace.

The notion that the intimacy of being enfolded in Klaus's arms is not new strikes her hard. More than just the recollection of his hands on her as she died teases at the edge of her mind. A wisp of a moment flutters just at the precipice of remembrance.

Perhaps moving with Klaus reminds her of a dream she once had.

She must've dreamt it sometime in the weeks following the sacrifice, in that odd blur of time when she was still feeling a little dead inside.

_Yes._

In the dream, she remembers running _like hell_ , and not being fast enough. She remembers—

He stops finally, on the outskirts of a city she does not recognize.

She moves to disengage, feeling like she has too many limbs as she fumbles for balance while extracting herself from Klaus's arms. She wobbles when her bare feet hit uneven ground and catches herself against him without thinking.

Heat radiates from his thinly covered flesh.

The contrast causes Elena to shiver.

Part of her wishes she had gone to bed wearing more than just a tank top. The other part of her wishes to undo the last few months, if she's allowed to wish at all.

Klaus must have noticed her trembling, because he slinks out of his shirt and hands it to her.

Elena tries very, very hard not to wrinkle her nose at the blood-soaked fabric. She makes the mistake of looking at him and catches an eyeful of his naked torso. Worse, when she tries to look away he snags her with his eyes.

"Be a dear and take the shirt." His tone brooks no argument, and she finds herself involuntarily responding to his request.

The shirt itself is drier than she expected—only the faintest moisture settles on her skin, and only where the darkest stains are.

"Whose blood is this?" she asks as she picks at the hem.

"I expect probably my father's—" He must notice the frown that gathers at the corners of her eyes, because he quickly corrects, "Well, not my real father's—he's long dead—but you probably know the story."

"Elijah told me." When did her voice get so hoarse?

"Mmm, when was that? Before, after, or in between betrayals?"

Elena focuses on rolling the overly long sleeves over her wrists as she tells him, voice even, though weak, "It wasn't like that."

Klaus closes in on her in the space between seconds. "And how was it _like_? As I recall, Elijah was ever a one for betrayal when it suited his _honor_."

"At least he had honor."

"Says the Petrova girl."

"What does that have anything to do with it?"

He circles her, and she must force herself to hold still as he breathes against the back of her neck, "I've never known a Petrova who didn't spin a convincing lie. Have you?"

She bites the inside of her cheek as she considers his words. Katherine, certainly, was a liar. Isobel as well. And as for herself… The optimistic part of her wants to say she learned to lie to survive. It makes sense, what with all the vampires and werewolves she's had to outwit over the last two years. The realistic side, though, remembers sneaking out of the house to drink in the woods or telling her parents she was going hiking with friends so she could indulge in wild weekends in the city with Caroline.

"Your silence is damning."

That's right, she supposes. But she's a Petrova doppelganger, and Elena is slowly starting to accept her birthright—to reign in Hell, and to wear her crown like an angel.

Finally, she tells him, "I'm not going to defend myself to you."

Klaus circles around again so that he faces her.

 _Good_ , she thinks. _Let him take a good look at me._ She raises her chin and meets his eyes before she tells him, "But it's those lies that've kept me alive, and it's those lies that've let me play on level with the Originals."

He almost laughs. Klaus's eyes belie a well of mirth as he concedes, "I suppose I can't fault you for that, then."

Grateful for the détente, Elena brushes past her companion to get a better look at the skyscrapers dominating the skyline.

"Where are we?"

"What used to be Philadelphia."

"Oh." She surveys the split buildings, the film of dust that lingers in the air. "It looks like a ghost town."

"I hope not. I was hoping for a bite."

Elena turns to study him as he prowls toward her.

Klaus isn't Damon. There is no way she'll be able to talk him out of it.

Finally, she asks, "Are all the other cities up North like this?"

"Depends. New York is still hobbling on, Boston's been evacuated lest the city sink into the harbor."

"You think there're people in Philly though?"

He smiles, all sharp teeth, and wraps his hands around her wrists as he guides her forward. "I know there are." He trails his fingers up her ribcage, until they settle over her heart. "I can hear them," he whispers against the shell of her ear. "Their hearts, the blood moving through their veins. It sings to me."

Elena squeezes her eyes shut. Anything, to block out her body's reaction to the feel of his chest pressed against her back.

One finger traces a line along her jaw from the base of her ear to the tip of her chin.

"Remember, my lovely, not to stray from me once we enter the city." He taps the tip of her nose like she's a pet. "Trouble will find a pretty girl like you if you're not careful."

As he leads her inside the city, Elena fears she will have to watch the murder from Klaus's side. She doesn't think she can handle it. She knows she wouldn't be able to go back to Klaus after she'd watched him slaughter some terrified woman, after she'd have to look the victim in the eyes as she died.

A few blocks into the decrepit remains of West Philly, Klaus pauses.

At first, Elena doesn't know what the hold up is. Then—

Sick anxiety blooms in her gut when she spies a woman standing on a street corner a few blocks south.

"Klaus," she murmurs as she clutches at his arm as though that could keep him back.

"Don't move."

Something in his tone warns her.

Hesitatingly, she turns her attention back to where the woman had been standing.

The street corner is empty.

Elena blinks, and almost screams as the woman materializes directly in front of her, circling on the edge of a heavily shady building. Elena realizes the woman is less a _woman_ , and more a _vampire._

She's pretty and looks young, though the way she conspicuously sticks to the shadows and the drawn, hungry look in her eyes says otherwise.

"Would you mind sharing?" the vampire asks. Her voice sounds husky and thin, the way Katherine's did after weeks left alone in the tomb. Her voice sounds _desperate_ for something to eat.

Elena tries to calm herself. She's safe so long as she's standing in direct daylight. The vampire obviously doesn't have a daywalking ring. Klaus has already told her he would protect her.

Klaus steps away, leaving her open and vulnerable to the vampire inching steadily closer.

The vampire abandons the relative safety of the shadows for the radiant morning sunshine and lunges for Elena's throat.

Elena never sees what happens. She sees the vampire's teeth, white and deadly, and then she sees the vampire abruptly freeze, sees the gray of immortal death seep into her skin.

There's a stake in the vampire's chest, and someone is twisting that stake inside the dying vampire's heart with exquisite malice.

"As a matter of fact, I _do_ mind," Klaus snarls at the vampire before he drops her and kicks her body back into the shadows.

For a long time, Elena doesn't know what to say. She doesn't know him well enough to read him, can't tell what the tense line of his shoulders means at all. Eventually, Elena speaks, her voice steadier than she feels. "Thanks."

Klaus turns toward her, eyebrows arched quizzically. "What for?"

"For saving me."

"I didn't do it for you, Elena."

"No?" She hugs herself, aware of the way her companion's shirt feels against her bare shoulders. "Thank you anyway. You still saved my life."

He stalks toward her. "I did it because I want as few vampires gallivanting about and indiscriminately eating all of the humans as possible. I don't exactly know how well they're going to hold up and I would like to be able to find something to eat in future."

"So you're just going to kill every vampire you see? Just like that?"

"Just like that, yes."

"That's cruel."

"I am cruel." He takes her by the hand again and steers her down a different street, away from the dead vampire. "You are too, Elena. Or at least you are deep down. You'll need it to survive in this world."

She wishes she didn't already know that.

He takes her to a brownstone building and looks around for a few minutes before leading her to a deserted apartment inside.

"Stay here," he tells her. "Lock yourself in. There isn't anyone else in the building, and any other vampire won't be able to get in until the sun goes down. I'll be back before then."

Left alone, Elena dutifully keeps the door dead-bolted and stays away from the windows, lest anyone see her from the street or a neighboring window. She doesn't even turn the lights on for fear of attracting notice.

The apartment is large and well-furnished. Red leather sofas sit in front of a sooty fire-place, and marble countertops glisten under her hands when she takes the time to wipe the dust off of them.

She finds two bedrooms in the back of the apartment. One looks like a guest room; no knick-knacks, books, or papers sit on the desk and the armoire is empty, save for a spare set of sheets.

The master bedroom interests her more.

Whoever lived here apparently left in a hurry, because the bed has been left unmade, clothes are haplessly thrown out of the drawers, and the wall-safe has been left wide open.

The bed looks large and luxurious.

More than anything, Elena wants to curl up against a pile of those pillows and go to sleep. She just can't bring herself to sleep in a stranger's bedding, to loll in whatever fears and uncertainties this person must have felt the last time he slept here.

Yet she is so, so tired.

Unable to help herself, she searches through the linen cabinet in the adjacent bathroom until she finds the king-sized sheets. Mechanically, she strips the bed and throws the used bedding in the bathroom hamper. The clean sheets feel heavenly against her face when she finally collapses atop the bed, her work complete.

She dozes for longer than she expects, waking up only when she feels the mattress dip near her knees.

The room is dim, and at first she can only make out the intruder's silhouette.

 _Only Klaus_ , she grasps with some relief once her eyes adjust. She tries not to think about the implications of _only_ Klaus.

Elena tries to sit up, but he waves her back down.

"Don't get up."

Of course, once he says that, all she wants is to get up out of this bed. She is suddenly all too aware that they are alone together in a dark room on a big bed, and she looks _exactly_ like one of his former lovers, if not two of them. She feels so, so stupid for not thinking about what must _inevitably_ happen between them when she first took his hand, when she first asked him to _wait_. He even told her he was only keeping her with him because of who she looked like.

Casually, he peels his shirt over his head and tosses it onto a nearby chair.

Elena hadn't even noticed he was wearing a shirt until he took it off.

"Where did the shirt come from?" she asks distractedly.

"A nice man gave it to me."

They both know she knows it was more than that.

He seems to study her face for signs of disgust, fear, anything, as he leans into her space.

She has to use all of her concentration to keep her expression neutral—though she suspects a little disapproval cannot help but twist her lip.

He shrugs after a minute and stands, circling toward the other side of the bed. Alarmingly, he begins unbuttoning his pants and toeing off his shoes.

Elena has never felt so much like a voyeur as when she watches him undress. Vaguely, she knows she shouldn't. Isn't he inviting her to stare by doing this in front of her?

Naked, he drops onto the other side of the bed.

If she focuses, she can hear the steady draw of his breath, can feel the way the mattress shifts as his diaphragm expands and collapses.

"What now?" she asks.

"Just go back to sleep, Elena."

"That's it?"

"I expect it's been a bit of a long day. I hardly thought you'd question the chance to rest." He pins her with vampiric speed. "But if you can't sleep—"

The hard line of his body elicits delicious, dangerous desires within her.

Elena's hands shake as she tries to push him off of her. "I can't—"

"That's what I thought." He rolls off of her.

"Klaus—"

"Just go to sleep, Elena. We have _plenty_ of time to get to know each other better."

She shifts as far away from him as possible without being obvious and throws a few pillows between them for good measure.

But after all that…

Klaus, as far as she can tell, has fallen asleep.

The early twilight moon filters blue light through the windows, softening his sleeping features into something Elena has never seen before.

Elena falls asleep wondering who this intimate stranger really is.

 

* * *


	6. Chapter 6

* * *

 

 

" _What do I interrupt?"_

_He has kept her waiting, and if he had been any other man, she would flout his advances and never give him her company again. But because he is Klaus, she shivers when she hears him and twists toward him eagerly._

" _He's returned." Elijah pauses as he studies his brother. "Long night?"_

_Blood covers Klaus's white shirt, sticks to his chest and coats the pale strands of hair framing his face._

_All of her sharp words fade as worry replaces her anger and dejection._

" _What has happened?" She cannot keep the anxiety out of her voice as she steps near him._

" _The wrong villager picked a fight at the tavern." Klaus presses a hand against her back to lead her away, unmindful of the blood he smears against the fine velvet dress he has bought her._

_She notices, as he brings her into the gardens and presses himself against her, that none of the blood is his._

A door slamming awakens her. The dream dissipates, until she can no longer clearly recall it. 

Elena opens her eyes to an unfamiliar room.

As always, her heart slams against her ribs for a second as she tries to piece together how she got here, whose bed she is in.

In that first minute, memories she cannot quite place crash against each other, until the important information comes back—

 _Klaus_.

For the first time in the almost three weeks they have spent together, Klaus didn't return home last night.

Ever since that first day, he has always found a place for Elena to wait for him, and at night he has always returned for her.

What will it mean, she wonders, if he never comes back?

A shower spigot turns, and the sound of rushing water wafts down the hall and into her bedroom.

Careful not to make too much noise, Elena slides out of bed and tiptoes toward the bathroom. She hopes, sincerely, that Klaus is in there, and not whoever actually owns the house, or worse, another vampire.

She creeps up to the bathroom threshold and peers through a crack in the door.

Klaus's clothing lies in a heap on the floor, and in the mirror she can see him rinsing soap from his hair.

Even after weeks of sleeping beside him, the sight of him still causes her cheeks to burn.

She hurries to the front of the house and occupies herself with month-old magazines that sit in cluttered piles on the glass coffee table.

Morning sun filters in through large bay windows, casting yellow pools of lights on the carpet and along the edges of Elena's toes.

Ten minutes later, Klaus drops onto the couch beside Elena and rests his feet on top of her magazine. Water droplets bead in his hair and drip down the back of his neck.

"Long night?" she asks, and frowns when the words don't sound the way she expects them to.

He stretches and grins. "Full moon was last night."

"So what does that mean?"

"The full moon rose, and I became a wolf."

She turns toward him and gives him a once over. Elena remembers, of course, his yellow eyes and distended fangs, but she cannot quite wrap her mind around what he seems to be saying.

"Does that mean you're just like a regular werewolf?"

He gets up then and heads toward the kitchen. "Don't be foolish. I'm far better."

"How?" she asks as she stands to follow him.

Klaus starts opening up cabinets and looking inside. "For one," he tells her as he routes through a hidden stash of liquor, "I can change at will."

"So you could become a wolf right now?"

He smirks at her as he pours himself a drink. "Would you care for a drink, Elena?"

She brushes past him, somewhat irritated with him for evading her question, and finds an unopened box of cereal for her breakfast.

After a few handfuls, eating dry raisin bran loses its appeal and she begins to long for the ease of before, of always having milk for her cereal and a modern grocery store close at hand.

Elena leans over her companion, grabs the bourbon, and takes a long swig straight from the bottle.

Klaus looks sincerely amused when she pushes the bottle back at him and asks, "Where to next?"

And there has always been a next.

In the last three weeks, she's learned that Klaus does not stay anywhere longer than he absolutely has to. He has never said as much, but she suspects that he is looking for something.

She just isn't sure she wants to ask him what he's looking for.

He finishes his glass in one long swallow and holds his hand out to her. "Shall we?"

This time, Elena does not hesitate to take it as he leads her outside.

He pulls a set of car keys from his pocket and opens up a Ferrari door for her.

"Where'd the car come from?" She already knows the answer, as she does every time she asks.

Klaus winks at her and says, "I met a lovely collector yesterday afternoon. She was kind enough to lend it to me."

The urge to stamp her foot and tell him _no_ , this is _wrong_ , and she won't have any part of it, rises like it always does and sits like a lump in her throat. She wants to say all those things, to leave and wash her hands clean of all these murders.

And if Klaus weren't all she had left, she would.

He drives much like the Salvatores did—every motion deliberate and direct, perfected after a century of practice and enhanced by vampire reflexes.

Was it just a month ago that Damon had last driven her in his blue Camaro?

The road runs like a split ribbon in front of them.

Ohio has become something of an island after Indiana and the western parts of Pennsylvania sank into the earth. The water that flooded the fresh Indianan and Pennsylvanian valleys is a shade of green Elena has never seen before—Klaus promises her there are beaches with water like that, and that someday he will show them to her when he finds them again.

The water forces them to skirt the broken countryside for hundreds of miles before they finally pass into a town that claims to be Jonesboro, Arkansas.

Miraculously, the buildings are all still standing straight and the Wal-Mart on the main drag of highway looks open.

Klaus pulls the car up to a house secluded by acres of flat, browning grass. "Stay in the car," he tells her before walking up the length of the front walk and knocking on the door.

The middle-aged woman who answers the door holds a shotgun in her hands.

Elena can't make out what she says, but she expects she's heard something like it before. _I can't be letting strangers into my house in times like this. Go away or I'll shoot—I mean it._

She also knows from the way the woman's face relaxes into a smile when she gestures for Klaus to come in that this is where they will be staying for the night.

Slowly, Elena unbuckles her seatbelt and follows Klaus into the house.

When she steps through the door, he purses his lips before telling her, "I thought I told you to stay in the car."

"You did." She examines the line of photographs sitting over the mantle, the diminished stores of dried food hoarded in the adjacent kitchen.

The house is dark, and quiet, the windows barred and the curtains drawn.

She pulls on Klaus's sleeve to get his attention before asking, voice low so only he can hear, "This town seems to be pretty much untouched." She points at the homeowner. "Why is she so afraid?"

"I imagine because she still has something left to defend." He turns toward the other woman and catches her gaze. "Don't invite anyone else into this house, understand?"

The woman nods her head.

"Good." Klaus turns back to her. "Would you care for a look around town, my dear?"

As he often does, he does not wait for her reply, because he doesn't really care; he's already decided, and his asking is just a polite artifact from growing up in an earlier time.

There isn't much to see here—the restaurants and stores are closed, save for that one Wal-Mart. Were it not for the fluttering movements in house windows that she catches out of the corner of her eye, Elena would have said the town was as deserted as most of the other places she had seen.

The Wal-Mart, though, thrums with people.

A mob billows out into the parking lot, shoving at each other as they try to reach the entrance.

Klaus stops the car several hundred yards away and studies the scene.

"Can you tell what's going on?"

"It seems the Wal-Mart's the only place left in town with any food. The head manager appears to be an enterprising fellow—he's locked the whole place up tight, hired a few armed guards, and is selling what's inside to the highest bidders."

He shifts the car in to reverse before u-turning it back in the direction of tonight's lodging.

As they leave the scene, Elena twists in her seat to get a last look at all those starving people.

For a moment, the crowd erupts like a geyser, spitting clouds of dust into the air as people clamor towards the doors. A gunshot rings out, then another and another, and the crowd stills completely.

After the scene at the Wal-Mart, Elena doesn't feel much like talking.

That seems to suit Klaus fine, because he just hums a little to himself, fingers tapping out a tune she's never heard before as he steers the car back up the middle-aged woman's driveway.

Klaus doesn't bother to knock when he opens the door. He breezes inside, pausing only to say something to the owner and tell Elena to stay inside while she waits for him.

"I'm going back into town," he explains. "I'll be back as usual." He hesitates. "Do be careful, Elena. Humans can be dangerous enough when the situation is desperate."

With that he leaves, and Elena has no choice but to wait with the other woman.

"How long has Jonesboro been like this?" she asks in an attempt to make conversation.

The woman stares at her blankly.

"I'm sorry, that was rude. I'm Elena." She offers her hand, and still nothing.

Obviously, Klaus has compelled her far more than she'd realized.

The knowledge doesn't disturb her the way it should.

Elena leaves the woman by herself in the front room and looks around the house for something to do. Eventually, she finds a bookshelf and busies herself reading _Gone with the Wind_.

A memory from a little over a year ago flickers to life.

 _Left alone in the Boarding House while Rose succumbed to her fever dreams. Her first time in Damon's room, and, amidst the Flemish paintings and ridiculously large bed, a worn copy of_ Gone with the Wind _._

She's all the way to the burning of Atlanta, remembering _Atlanta has burned, we made it through the War_ , when Klaus drops a book into her lap.

"What's this?" she asks as she flips through the blank pages.

"I believe you used to keep a journal." He hands her a packet of pens.

Without saying anything else, he turns and leaves the room.

Elena fingers the spine of the journal. The book is almost identical to every other journal she has ever kept. There is nothing special about it except the thought behind it.

A Wal-Mart quality assurance sticker catches her eye on the lower-left corner of the back-flap.

She stands, tucking the journal against her breast, as she searches the house for Klaus. She finds him already lounging in bed, arms tucked under his head as he looks at the ceiling.

"I wanted to thank you for the journal," she begins.

"It was hardly difficult to get."

"Still, you had to go through the crowd to get it. So thank you."

He nods slowly as though he is measuring her. "You're welcome."

Elena places the journal down on the bedside table and tries to relax as she settles into the bed.

The task proves impossible, though, because— _he's a very charming man._

They leave Jonesboro the next morning. As they head out of town, Elena sees that the crowd still churns outside the Wal-Mart, and she breathes an inward sigh of relief that he didn't massacre everyone who got in his way.

Over the next few days, Elena begins to notice the little things in a way she hadn't before he'd given her the journal.

Her safety, she realizes, is a real priority for him. And as often as he touches her, perhaps somewhat possessively, during the day, he has never forced himself on her at night.

If she thinks about it, she realizes that he has not so much as kissed her since that first day. From everything she has learned of him from Katherine, his behavior seems out of character.

She falls asleep in the car one night as they drive indefinitely west under a canopy of stars. She wakes up a few hours later, covered in his jacket.

Jazz music filters quietly from the radio.

After a month with Klaus, Elena hesitatingly recognizes the recording.

The sense of familiarity she's starting to feel with him pushes her to speak. "What am I to you?"

He glances at her. "I'm a social animal. I like the company."

Elena shrugs the jacket off. "I'm sorry, I'm confused. After that first day, I thought—I thought you'd want—" She stumbles over her words, finds herself suddenly shying away from the topic.

"What?" Klaus turns toward her and eyes her speculatively. "Sex?"

Quietly, she answers, "Yes."

He turns back toward the road, adjusts the radio reception. "I've never told you it wasn't my intention."

"Then why haven't… Why haven't we slept together yet?"

"Because you're just giving up. As much as I like a woman with a Petrova's face, I like a woman with a Petrova's fire a whole lot more." He pulls over and grabs her chin. "When you come to me, it won't be as a refugee."

The way he looks at her makes her think he's willing her to understand what he's asking for. Deep down, she thinks maybe she knows—she remembers the girl he's looking for, the girl who told him to _go to Hell,_ the girl who gave up her life for those of her loved ones.

He lets her go and restarts the car. "I'm waiting for you to wake up," he concludes as he pulls back onto the highway.

"Oh. Okay then."

For a few days, Elena thinks about his words. She writes feverishly in her journal and contemplates what she wants, right at this moment.

She reaches her decision, almost changes her mind, then ultimately decides _yes_.

Klaus strolls through the front door of their latest apartment late that night. As per usual, he steps into the bedroom and begins taking off his shirt before even saying hello. He stops mid-motion when he sees Elena, out of her usual place, sitting on the edge of the bed and wringing her hands.

"And what has my darling in such a pretty mess?" he asks.

Deliberately, she stands, approaches him, and presses her mouth against his.

He doesn't quite respond at first, and she feels a little disappointed as she pulls back to wait.

His eyes bore into her as he searches her face.

Elena raises her chin and tilts her head. She knows, from past encounters, that this posture always tips him off-balance.

Finally, he asks, "Are you quite sure of yourself, Elena? Because I'm not going to offer you a way out if you say yes."

"I'm sure."

Klaus tucks her hair behind her ear. "There now," he murmurs. "That wasn't so hard."

And then he is edging her toward the bed, bending her back and pulling off his shirt while she shimmies her jeans down her legs. Altogether, they both end up undressed and pressed skin to skin faster than she had anticipated.

He surprises her, somewhat; he is more attentive than she had imagined, yet still too rough on her.

Throughout the entire night, she feels like her bones will break and shatter from the weight of him pressing into her, rocking against her hard enough to make her ribs creak. Bruises bloom along the inner line of her thigh where he caresses her, and she later finds a cut along her shoulder where he has dragged his teeth.

Even so, he takes his time to memorize what pleases her, to discover what teases the most pleasure from her flesh. He's thorough and _fun_ and her entire world exists in the circle of his arms and the hot pressure of his mouth.

The first time she hooks her legs around his waist and he thrusts inside of her, he whispers her name against her ear.

Elena cannot shake the feeling, though, that what she hears and what he really means to say are two different things. In the back of her mind, she can sense the reverberations of— _Katerina Katerina Tatia Tatia Tatia_. And for a moment, she wonders who it is he makes love to, before forgetting she had the thought at all.

When morning comes, they don't get up and get on the road. Instead, they spend the morning in bed, spooned together and unable to untangle themselves from each other.

For the first time since the sacrifice, Elena feels unabashedly happy. That she should have found this with her enemy seems to matter very little.

Two days later, they finally get out of bed and leave the apartment for a new town in Nevada.

The new place seems promising, and Elena cannot keep the smile off of her face as she arranges her hair and examines the row of lovebites on her neck while waiting for Klaus to come home.

Klaus comes back so late that night that she's already fallen asleep by the time he rolls onto the bed.

Groggily, she opens her eyes as he ducks down to kiss along her jaw. Her hand fumbles for the lamp while he pushes a hand under her shirt and palms her breast.

The light snaps on and she gets her first good look at him.

Blood spatters his shirt, mats the stubble on his jaw.

"What happened?"

He stops and smiles, like he's telling an inside joke. "The wrong villager picked a fight at the tavern."

Elena gets it, though, because the joke is on her for ever forgetting who Klaus really is.

 

* * *


	7. Chapter 7

* * *

 

 

_For two days Klaus played her lover. He kissed her from the tips of her toes to the crown of her head, stroked her arms and her belly as he whispered half-remembered promises into her skin._

_For two days Elena gave herself to him. She put all of the grief and the loneliness and the heart that already had too many men with sweet smiles and wicked eyes in it into a little box in the corner of the room and didn't looked at it once._

" _Do you always squirm this much?" Klaus asked, voice on the precipice of falling into breathy laughter._

_Elena kicked at his legs, but only made a mess of the covers. "When I'm being tickled, yes."_

_The look he gave her had been all innocence. "_ Tickled? _I don't tickle." He pinned her then, insinuated his knee between her legs and kissed her dizzy._

_When she started gasping against his mouth, he nipped her lower lip before working his way down her torso until he could hook her legs over his shoulders._

_Embarrassed, she began to pull away, but a firm hand on her stomach prevented her from disengaging._

" _Just relax." He gave her a roguish grin. "It won't tickle, I promise."_

_Elena complied, to the best of her abilities. She looked at the pale ceiling and concentrated on the cool sheets against her bare skin, and tried not to anticipate Klaus's actions too keenly._

_And then she felt his mouth working against her, felt the familiar warmth suffuse her limbs as he tongued her._

_She felt his shoulders tense under her legs as she moaned low in her throat. She caught his eyes as he hurtled her toward orgasm, saw the look of unabashed desire there._

_She wove her fingers into his hair, desperate to bring him closer, heedless of whatever modesty she had felt before—_

"Get off of me."

Klaus flicks his eyes toward her. They glow a menacing shade of yellow, phosphorescent and predatory in the lamplight.

Fear slithers through her veins at the sight of him. _Only a wolf_ , she thinks weakly.

He laughs, and there's no mirth in the sound of it. "What's the matter, Elena?" he asks as he takes one of her hands and begins playing with each digit's joint. "You don't like seeing me as I truly am?"

For a wild moment, she thinks he will pull her hand apart at the seams.

"You can sleep in my bed," he continues, "let me fuck you senseless, so long as you don't have to think about what I do when I'm not by your side?"

Elena rises up on her elbows and tries to twist away, but it takes him no effort at all to push her back into the mattress.

He ghosts a hand down her side, pausing when his fingers curl just below her navel. "Do you know how many times I've come to you, slept beside you, with the taste of blood still warming my mouth?" He eases his hand lower, traces a pattern around her kneecap before trailing his hand up her thigh, where it lingers, heavy and immovable. "Did you know, my darling girl, that when you approached me the other night, asked me to have you as I will, I'd just come in from killing an entire little family? They were sweet, really. A mother and a father and two girls, tucked away from the world in their grandparents' bomb shelter until I found them."

Tears leak down her face as he describes how he killed them, how the children screamed when he drained their mother dry. "Please," she gasps when she knows she couldn't bear to hear another word, "Please. I know what you are and I know what you do, but couldn't you please stop killing?" She falters and decides to gamble on the last two days. "For me?"

Elena catches his eyes and refuses to back down as she pours every drop of Petrova appeal into her expression, her voice, her very heartbeat.

Something indefinable shifts in his face and seems to replace his anger with some other emotion Elena can only guess at.

Klaus leans forward and kisses the tears away from her face. He takes his hands off of her and reverses their positions, so he can pull her against him and cradle her in his arms while he strokes her hair.

He doesn't say anything at all, but his touch is soft and his chest is warm and solid.

Wrapped in his embrace, she feels a faint fluttering of hope. Perhaps she has persuaded him—

No. This sudden shift in demeanor must mean something else. Something terrible.

Elena isn't stupid. She knows this set-up with Klaus is temporary at best. She knows that while he may value her and keep her safe for now, their arrangement only exists because she is the last tie he has to his own past. As soon as he grows comfortable in this new world, he's likely to kill her the way he's killed everyone else who has ever gotten too close to him.

Klaus will always leave oceans of blood in his wake. Her own personal experiences with him should have taught her that (the fact that every other person who has ever encountered him has told her the same thing should have just made his true nature that much harder to forget). Klaus will kill everything he touches, and she won't be able to stop him.

Yet… might she be able to dissuade him for a _time_? If she could keep his interest long enough, might she be able to keep pushing at him, until…?

Klaus twirls a strand of her hair around his finger and whispers against her ear, "Be a good girl and go to sleep now."

"Klaus, just a minute ago you were—"

"We have all the time in the world to talk about it later. Hush now."

Reluctantly she settles against him.

Her feelings are too complex for her to unravel tonight. They would be simpler to examine, she thinks, if she hadn't ever discovered that Klaus is equal parts tender and cruel, as prone toward callousness as thoughtfulness.

 

* * *

 

_Klaus doesn't wake her the next morning, so she ends up sleeping until almost mid-afternoon._

The angle of the sun surprises her as she slips out of bed—she comes up with a myriad of reasons why they haven't left, but ultimately shrugs them all off. The last few days have broken their routine, and she no longer knows if she can even rely on former certainties.

The house they are staying in is a cinder-block starter home in the desert. It consists mainly of the back bedroom and a large, multi-purpose front room with screen windows and a leaky faucet. All in all, it's smaller and less luxurious than the accommodations Klaus tends to choose, but when she had asked why this house, he had told her, "The same reason any house is chosen—location."

Elena drifts into the kitchenette and finds Klaus pouring powdered eggs into a skillet and adding water.

"You cook?" Thick skepticism sticks to her tongue as she rubs grime out of her eyes.

He glances over his shoulder at her. "When the occasion warrants it."

The domesticity of the scene—Klaus with his green shirt-sleeves rolled up to his elbows and a kitchen towel thrown over his shoulder—strikes her as absurd. No matter how she looks at it, she can't quite reconcile this man with the nightmare from last night.

She takes a seat at the kitchen counter and watches him stir the eggs while she ponders what to say.

The smell distracts her.

She doubts the eggs will be any good, but still. Even powdered eggs are something of a treat.

"Why didn't you wake me?" she eventually asks when she can't think of a stealthier lead-in.

Klaus snaps the towel from his shoulder and wraps it around the handle of the skillet. "I still have business here in town," he admits as he empties the entire batch of eggs onto a plate for Elena.

She senses an opening. "What kind of business?"

He offers her a smile. "Try your eggs, sweetheart. The powdered stuff doesn't hold the heat very long."

She stabs a clod of egg and scoops it into her mouth. They're better seasoned than she'd expected, and she finds herself grudgingly grateful to Klaus for making her breakfast.

He watches her the way anyone would while waiting for a reaction to his cooking.

She notices he must have shaved this morning. Probably because he couldn't get the blood out of his stubble. She loses her appetite.

Setting her fork back down, she persists her questioning. "So if you still have business in town, why aren't you doing it during the day? Isn't that what you normally do?"

"It can wait a few hours." He taps his fingers against the counter and leaves the room without saying anything more.

He's so casual, so dismissive of last night's scene.

Elena can't help but worry that he's planning something, and that she'll soon find out what.

For the rest of the afternoon, Elena watches as Klaus flips through coffee table books and sketches maps of the land they've passed through in a spiral notebook he's taken to carrying with him. It's all very mundane, and after a few hours she begins to feel less suspicious.

He takes a nap around dinner time, so she shuts herself back up in the bedroom to write in her journal.

With all that has happened since she last wrote in her journal four days ago, she loses track of time as she tries to clarify her mind.

A knock on the door startles her and she smears fresh ink all over the page.

Klaus steps into the room, wearing a clean shirt and a suede jacket. He studies her the way he did right before he broke the curse.

"What is it?" She swallows the words around the pit in her throat.

"I want to show you something." He tosses her a coat from her gradually expanding suitcase and waits by the front door for her to put her shoes on.

He opens the door for her as soon as she nears him and waits for her to step over the threshold. Usually the glint of humor in his eyes betrays the enjoyment he gets out of acting a gentleman. Tonight, though, his face is hidden behind an impenetrable mask.

Elena, too, has a mask, and she's learned to wear it the same way she learned to walk in heels as a girl. Nervous as she is when she feels Klaus's hand on the small of her back, she keeps her breathing steady and her steps even. She lets him guide her down the front steps and onto the pebble walkway as though fear does not choke her every thought.

They pass the car and Elena realizes he intends for them to run.

Klaus stops almost as soon as she grasps his intention and seizes her against him. "Are you ready, my dear?"

She slings her arms around his neck, more out of habit than desire. "For what? Where are we going?"

She never gets her answer. The earth spins out from under her and the wind whips her eyes as they hurtle through the wilderness.

The run lasts only a few minutes before he deposits her on the ground, keeping his hand on her shoulder to steady her as she tries to separate the sky from the ground.

Once the vertigo passes, she realizes that they have stopped outside of another house.

Through a lit window, Elena can see a woman rubbing lotion into her butterscotch-brown arms as she prepares for bed.

She looks to Klaus for answers, but he doesn't provide them.

"Elena, I want you to scream for me."

Bewildered, she shakes her head. "Why…?"

As far as she knows, Klaus has never compelled her before. All the same, she knows with sick certainty that he must have this time, because he ducks in front of her face so that she cannot help but look into his eyes, she blinks, and inexplicably begins to scream until her throat feels like sand-paper.

The woman drops her lotion on the table and hurries onto her front step.

Elena has never actually seen Klaus ambush someone before. Encountering his speed while sharing his temporal reality is an entirely different experience than watching something become nothing with no event to bridge the gap.

Movement catches her attention some five feet from where she stands while she is still looking at the impossibly empty front step.

Her heart sinks when she sees Klaus clutching the woman against his chest, one hand poised around her neck while the other snakes around her ribcage.

At first, the woman seems somehow confident that she will escape. She narrows her eyes and mutters strange words in deep, powerful tones.

Nothing happens.

As the seconds tick by the woman loses her composure. She seems to realize who has caught her, because she struggles like a dying fish in Klaus's arms, clawing at his hands and face even as the flesh re-knits into unblemished beauty. She begins to sob, loud, desperate hiccups that roll and echo through the wide desert surrounding them.

The whole time, Klaus's attention never waivers from Elena's face.

Elena keeps her voice low and steady when she asks, "What do you want with her?"

"Miss Turner here?" Klaus hitches his victim forward, so Elena has no choice but to meet the other woman's eyes, to smell the sweat trickling down her brow. "The vivacious Anya Turner is one of the witches responsible for this mess." He shifts until the shadows hide his face. "I like to set an example, Elena. That means punishing those who cross me."

She doesn't miss the double-meaning.

"Didn't you say you would spare some? To have in case you needed magic?"

"Unfortunately, our dear Anya isn't strong enough to earn that privilege."

Anya's eyes reel in their sockets as she fumbles to loosen Klaus's grip. By now, her hands are slick with his blood.

He gives Elena a wide smile as his hand tenses around Anya's jaw.

Elena dodges forward, hands held out in front of her. Whether she means to surrender or placate, she doesn't know. "Please, Klaus, I'll do _anything_. Just let her go."

He lowers his hand. "Anything?"

"Anything."

"Anything is a big promise, my dear. I doubt you can quite compass the breadth of it."

"I know what I said."

"Really?" He smirks. "I was hoping you'd say that." He snaps Anya's neck. "I just didn't want you to think you have any power here."

Klaus doesn't even bother to drain the witch. He steps over her body like it's a rock and throws a companionable arm around Elena's shoulders. "Shall we?"

"Was that it?"

"Would you like to see more?"

"No. I've seen enough."

And she has.

 

* * *


	8. Chapter 8

* * *

 

 

_Sometimes when he looks at her, he's not sure who he's looking at._

Elena, of course, is neither Tatia nor Katerina. She's hardly self-possessed enough to be Tatia and certainly not self-centered enough to be Katerina. There are moments, though—when he catches a flash of something in her eyes— in which he mistakes this Gilbert doppelganger for her Petrova predecessors.

After he disposes of Anya Turner, he takes Elena to the Nevada Coast and then North into Saskatchewan.

He finds an isolated cabin to stash her in while he cleans out the dozen or so witches who have fled to this region. A few of the witches rumored to be here sound promising—he hopes one or two might be worth sparing.

He leaves Elena, who will hardly look at him, alone for a few days. He figures that by the time he comes back, she will have gotten over her petty _morality_ and will be more fun.

Imagine his surprise when he strolls through the door four days later and finds her sitting amongst a pile of homemade weapons.

Beautiful, ingenious little trinkets that she's pulled together—trinkets that, used correctly, might catch an ordinary vampire by surprise. He takes a clinical interest in the box of vervain darts, the air-gun stake-launcher.

And then there is Elena. She slumps against the wall, her knees pulled up to her chin, watching him through the curtain of her hair. She emanates a deathly stillness he has never sensed in her before.

Stranger still, she makes no move to attack him.

"Where did you learn to make these?" he cannot help but ask as he steps through the doorway.

"Ric taught me." Her voice sounds rough, as though she hasn't used it in a long time.

"Ric?"

"Alaric Saltzman."

"Oh, you mean the vampire hunter I possessed." He smiles at the memory. "Man had an excellent taste in Bourbon." Klaus kneels at her feet and fingers a vervain grenade made out of the shell of an old glass Christmas ornament. "What ever happened to him?"

"One of your brothers killed him when I was abducted. He died trying to protect me."

He abandons the grenade and taps lightly against the arch of her foot. "Many do it seems."

Elena turns away, but he sees the wall of tears in her eyes just the same.

Normally, Klaus would seek to shatter her emotionally—but he has already pushed this girl very, very far lately. He instead settles on asking her, "And the vervain? Where did that come from?"

She swallows convulsively before she replies, "I've had it since we crossed Iowa. Just in case."

That long. Yet again he's underestimated how capable this girl really is.

It strikes him then that while Tatia had been self-possessed and Katerina self-centered, _Elena_ is self-reliant.

Somewhat unsatisfied with the encounter, he stands and turns toward the door. At the threshold, he pauses, so he can throw over his shoulder, "One more thing, my dearest Elena. I hope you are _never_ stupid enough to use any of those weapons on me."

When she doesn't respond, he uses his vampiric speed to shove her against the wall. Her head cracks audibly and leaves a red stain on the wallpaper. He'll break her by accident if he doesn't watch himself.

"Betrayal isn't worth the consequences. I'll hunt down and kill everything you've ever loved—"

"Your family's already done that. I have nothing left to lose."

He grinds his teeth. Switches tactics. "None of those playthings will do so much as burn my flesh."

Her pupils dilate and constrict in mismatched rhythm. He's probably given her a concussion.

She stares him down just the same.

"A girl can dream."

He sees it then—that Petrova fire he had longed to awaken in her. For a crazed instant, he confuses the girl in front of him with a girl a thousand years dead who shared her face.

He leaves before she can burn him after all.

 

* * *

 

_She feels fire. The heat of it lapping against her face is the only sense she has left, and she clings to it like a lover._

The room contracts and expands like a funhouse mirror.

Elena holds onto her composure until she hears the front door slam and is absolutely certain Klaus has gone out again.

When fifteen slow minutes tick by on her watch and still he hasn't returned, she knows he won't be back anytime soon.

Her legs feel like rubber but she tries to stand _up_ anyway, but instead falls _down_ and smashes an ornament under her knee. Blood seeps through her jeans where the glass slices through the skin. Elena wipes at it, but it doesn't stop flowing so she gives up.

She leans back against the wall and notices a red stain a few inches away where her head had been during her encounter with Klaus. When she reaches out and touches it, her fingers come back wet.

The wall sways uncertainly behind her. She braces herself against it and closes her eyes to fight the nausea rippling through her gut.

_She can't see anything at all. Earlier, the full moon had illuminated the forest's nighttime secrets, but now, cloaked in flame, she sees nothing at all._

Her innards buzz like there is something alive inside of her clawing its way out.

Elena clamors upward against the wall and staggers toward the bathroom. She scrubs sweat from her eyes and blanches, because her hands are still bloody from touching her knee.

The walls dive in and out of her vision.

_She stumbles forward until her skin sears, but instinct keeps her back._

Her pulse thuds in her ears, spreading fresh agony with each thump.

Bile chokes her as she lurches toward the toilet.

She wretches until she spits red, until each muscle spasm forcing her gorge into her mouth produces only the bitter taste of stomach acid.

She makes it to the bed, somehow. She means to just rest for a minute, but her eyelids droop shut almost against her will.

_Nothing exists but the fire._

_And then—_

Klaus.

"I'm here."

Klaus leans over her and smooths the hair from her face.

"The fire," she gasps. "I can't breathe." She writhes on the bed, claws at her mouth and her throat, but no air comes.

Klaus pries her hands away from her face like she's a child. "Relax and you'll get more air." Almost as an afterthought, he asks, "What fire, dear heart?"

_The flames sputter, and she catches a heart-breaking glimpse of him in the flickering light._

His face is so close, so familiar, and she cannot make sense of anything but the dual pangs of longing and terror that seep through her blood.

Lucidity unfurls within her for a fleeting second.

"I'm going to die in the fire."

"As opposed to the flood?" he asks her quietly as he strokes her cheek. Klaus fastens his hand around her jaw and tips her head back. His fingers prod against the back of her head where she is most tender. "You're just concussed."

She locks eyes with him and cannot stifle the primordial fear that arises at the sight of his inhuman, yellow irises and his elongated fangs.

Casually, he lifts his wrist to his mouth and bites deep into the flesh. He presses the bloody wrist against her parted lips and rubs her throat until she swallows.

"There's a good girl, now. That's right."

Slowly, the suffocating pressure urging her to slip into unconsciousness dissipates and her vision begins to return to normal.

Awareness trickles back into her.

Klaus looms over her, trapping her against the pillows.

"All better?" he asks as he inspects her.

She turns her head away. "Yeah. I'm fine."

A normal man might feel the need to apologize—he might say, _I'm sorry for giving you brain damage_ or _I didn't mean to hurt you and I promise to never do it again._

But since Klaus _isn't_ normal (he's not even a man), he slides into the spot next to her and tucks his arms behind his head as though the blood matting the hair to the back of her scalp isn't his fault.

They lie in silence for the better part of thirty minutes before she can't bear the quiet any longer.

She sits up and hugs her legs to her chest so she has something to hold onto when she asks, "Where have you been?"

He shifts in her direction. "From your little greeting party earlier, I would have thought you didn't care."

Elena fidgets with the torn knee of her jeans as she searches for an answer. "I wish I didn't," she finally admits.

Interest sparks in his eyes before he suppresses it as though it were never there at all.

"And why, my dear, do you say that?" He pronounces each word precisely and deliberately.

She chooses not to answer his question.

"I can't ignore what you are anymore." She squeezes her eyes closed as she searches for words, and all she sees are the fires from her delirium. Elena inhales deeply through her mouth as she waits for the remnant panic to fade. "I can't ignore what you are," she continues, "but apparently, when it comes down to it, I can't bring myself to do anything about it either." She opens her eyes and finds Klaus closer than when she closed them. "I knew I couldn't kill you, but I wanted to at least _try."_

"But you didn't."

"I couldn't." She whispers the words like they're her worst secret.

Klaus hears her anyway.

"Elena, what is so precious about your _humanity_ that you cling to it so stubbornly?"

"I—" She bites her lip.

Klaus runs a hand down the side of her neck. "No one is watching you, except for me."

Elena reaches out to lay her hand against the warm flesh over his heart. It beats steadily under her palm, as it probably has for a thousand years.

"You told me once that I was cruel." She digs her thumbnail into his skin in a momentary fit of spite. Watches as his body erases her marks like she never touched him. "You were right, of course. For three days I thought about nothing but killing you. By the fourth day I knew I never could."

He snatches her hand up and she realizes she's been digging trenches in his skin. She's lucky he's been patient with her.

He kisses the blood off her fingertips. After a pause, he tells her, "That's hardly cruel."

"You don't understand. When I realized I couldn't kill you, I was deciding to sit back and let everything burn. I was deciding that I would rather have you, even if it came at the price of…"

"All of those grisly murders?" He leers at her. "Sweetheart, for people like you and me, death is just an inevitable part of the deal."

"Not for you."

"No, not for me, and generally not for you. But for everyone else we encounter?" He doesn't finish his sentence, instead choosing to draw her knees down and pull her atop him.

She can't help shivering when he rolls his hips against her. Yet, before he throws her back into their old patterns, she has to know, "So what now?"

"Now, I'm going to—"

" _No_ , not _now_ now. I mean, what am I supposed to do, knowing what I'm capable of?"

He rests his mouth against her pulse. She can feel his lips move as he speaks against her throat. "You'll do what you've been doing—writing in your journal, singing off-key in the shower, and letting me have my wicked way with you. You'll just sleep better at night. Really, Elena, it's very simple."

His words make surprising sense.

"Okay."

"Okay?"

"Yes. Okay. Let's do this."

He nips at the space under her chin. "I was hoping you would say that."

 

* * *

 

_Klaus is right, of course._

Elena _does_ sleep better. Knowing he is out there probably murdering innocent people while she boils water for her tea doesn't sting any less than it used to whenever she thinks about it; she just learns to measure those thoughts against what it would feel like to fumble through her days without Klaus by her side. And every day she gets a little better at it.

 

* * *

 

_He ghosts into the shower one afternoon as she scrubs the shampoo out of her hair._

"Here, let me get that," he murmurs against her shoulder.

His voice, so close, startles her and she slips on the soapsuds collecting under her feet.

Klaus catches her under her arms and pulls her against him. His chest rumbles pleasantly and his shoulders shake with laughter.

Elena looks up at him and notices the blood freckling his cheekbone. She glances down, observes that the water at her ankles is tinged pink, and surmises that most of the blood had already been washed off while her back was turned.

"You're back early," she tells him as she offers him the soap.

Their fingers touch as he lifts the bar from her palm.

As ashamed as she is to admit it, even now she feels desire stir low in her abdomen.

He motions with his finger for her to turn around, so her back faces him. "Well, I make my own hours," he says as he runs the soap from the base of her neck down the length of her spine.

She leans into his touch and half moans, "I'm glad."

He guides the soap lower, cupping her ass in one hand as he trails the soap over her hip bone with the other. "And why is that?"

Soap coats his fingers. It runs in slippery rivulets down every curve of her body and ultimately pools in his palm as his fingers push between her legs.

Elena leans back and links her hands behind his neck so she can pull his face down to hers. "Because I've missed you," she breathes into his mouth.

He twists his hand from between her legs. "Spread your legs for me."

"Like this?"

"Just." Klaus grips her hips and thrusts into her. With each stroke he stretches her deliciously.

"More," she rasps. "Klaus, I want—I want—" She doesn't know.

"You're becoming quite the wanton mistress, my dear," he tells her as he scrapes his teeth along her shoulder.

She groans when he shifts angles inside of her and changes his pace.

He bites the junction between her neck and shoulder with blunt teeth, but still _hard_.

The sensation sets off a chain reaction, and soon her muscles begin to ripple and contract.

All she can hear are the low, almost familiar words that come from his mouth as he urges her further still.

 

* * *

 

_In Guadalajara, everything changes._

Klaus leaves her in an abandoned house and tells her, like he did their very first day together, that this time he will be back before dark.

"Are there other vampires here?" she asks.

He cocks his head to the side. "Probably."

She doesn't ask him how he knows—she's come to accept the fact that he _always_ knows.

Elena doesn't feel too nervous.

The sun beats steadily, and so long as Klaus returns before nightfall (which he _will_ ), she'll be safe.

She finds an old striped blanket and pulls it over her to take an afternoon nap in a puddle of sun that spills in through a western facing window.

Muffled voices wake her.

Outside the house, she can hear two people trying very, very hard not to be heard. She hears them, she suspects, only because they pass right underneath her window.

" _I can hear someone's heart beat."_

Vampires.

Elena crawls toward the back of the house, where her duffel bag of weapons is stashed. She's grateful, just then, that Klaus has allowed her to keep them.

She strains every sense toward her hunters as she pulls out a vervain dart gun, her stake launcher. At the last minute, she thinks to turn on an old boom box so the music will cloak her heartbeat.

Footsteps creak on the back porch.

Someone tries the door, finds it locked, and punches the handle in.

A feminine hand slips through the hole in the door and unflips the lock.

Elena ducks into a blind corner. From this spot, she won't be able to see her captor, but hopefully they won't see her either until it's too late. She knows the only way she'll survive is if she catches the intruders off guard.

In the end, she doesn't move fast enough.

Lightning punches her off her feet and pins her onto the floor. The vampire atop her knocks her weapons out of her hand before she can use them and lunges for her throat, only to stop mid-motion.

Elena's eyes focus on the familiar face six inches from her own.

"Caroline?"

The vampire scrambles away from her.

At first glance, Caroline is exactly as Elena remembers—which should be obvious, because, hey, she's _immortal_. On closer inspection, though, Elena notices details like Caroline's dirty nails and worn, thin face that drive home how far they are from Mystic Falls.

In the next room, whoever else is in the house turns off the music.

They look at each other, unable to speak, until Caroline's accomplice steps into the room.

"Elena?" Tyler's puzzled, skeptical voice catches her attention. "What are you doing here?"

Carefully, Elena stands and approaches her former friends.

She doesn't know where to begin.

Caroline's head whips toward the front of the house. "Elena," she whispers, "Is someone else in the house?"

As if on cue, Klaus calls her name.

 

* * *


	9. Chapter 9

* * *

 

 

_Klaus's clear voice belongs unmistakably to the villain of the piece._

" _Elena?"_

Elena jabs her finger and thrusts her chin in the direction of the backdoor. There's no time to make sure her friends take her pantomime directions.

If she doesn't go to Klaus immediately, he'll go to her, and that would be infinitely worse.

"I'm here," she calls as she hurries toward the front of the house.

She finds him standing in the yellow splash of sun she had napped in, studying the blanket she'd tossed aside when she heard Caroline and Tyler outside the house.

He scoops it up and hands it to her. "Were you using this?" he asks lightly.

She takes the blanket from him and wraps it around her shoulders, careful not to let him see her hands shake. "I was taking a nap." Did that sound defensive?

"On the floor?"

"I wanted to lie in the sun."

He runs a finger along the back of her ear. "Ah. Just like a cat, I see." He lets her go and moves past her, toward the back rooms.

"Wait!"

Klaus turns back in her direction and waits. When she doesn't speak, he prods her. "Yes? You know how I love it when you ask me to _wait_."

She licks her lips as she steps toward him. "I slipped on my way to the bathroom and hurt my ankle. Would you be able to tell if it was sprained?" The lie is not too far from the truth. Caroline _had_ snagged her ankle outside the bathroom when she'd pinned her.

His eyes dart to the hem of her jeans. "You seem to be walking alright." He doesn't add _I'm sure it's fine_ _(because you're lying)_ , but it lingers in the air between them just the same.

"Come on. Heightened vampire werewolf hybrid senses and a thousand years field experience? It'll just take a second." She balances on one leg like a flamingo as she rolls her jeans up to expose the ankle in question.

Relief floods her when she notices, sure enough, that the ankle has turned a telltale, puffy red. In all the commotion, she hadn't even noticed it was stiff.

Klaus approaches her with deliberate ease and crouches in front of her to look at her leg. Gently, he cups her heel in one hand and maneuvers the joint.

It doesn't hurt too badly, but she hisses through her teeth like it does.

"Well," he drawls as he feathers his fingertips over the swollen flesh. "You won't be running for a bit. Unless…?"

"Unless what?"

He quirks his eyebrows suggestively. "What are you willing to trade to get that touched up?"

She shivers. Would playing along halt him longer?

"I'll just wait for it to heal naturally."

He looks somewhat skeptical. "Suit yourself."

"What? I did that all the time before you vampires came along."

The only sign of amusement he betrays is the almost imperceptible twitch of his lip. "You're right," he tells her. "I forget it's not all stabbing yourself with a kitchen knife and flipping your car."

He swings her up bridal style and marches her toward the back bedroom. "I still don't want to wait for you to hobble over," he gives her by way of explanation.

Elena strains her senses searching for any noises, any hints of another presence in the house. She knows, of course, that Klaus will hear, see, and smell anything well before she ever will, but she hopes to _notice_ what he won't while distracted.

Something crushes under his shoe.

"Elena, sweetheart, why are all your lovely little weapons out?"

There's no good answer, because there's only one reason.

"I thought I heard a noise."

He sets her down. "Did you? Is there anything you wish to tell me?"

"N-no. I was wrong."

He rubs a lock of her hair between his thumb and forefinger. After a considerable silence, he tells her, "I'm glad to hear it. We wouldn't want any harm befalling you, now would we?" He releases her and smiles like he knows something before settling onto a wooden bench at the foot of the bed to pull off his shoes.

Elena slinks toward him. "What did you do today?" she hedges.

He pauses in the middle of peeling his sock off of his pale foot. "Actually, I killed three vampires today. The city's as overrun as I suspected."

" _Three_? We haven't seen that many in one place since we left the East Coast."

He shrugs. "It's hardly a meteoric number."

In the interior of the house, something slams hard.

Klaus jumps to his feet. "Stay here," he orders her.

She can hardly listen to him when it might be Caroline in the next room. She snags a vervain dart just in case she has to divert him, though she doubts it will be of any use to her, and trails after him.

The backdoor flaps against the wall.

"Did you check the door before?" he asks her when she steps directly behind him. Before she has time to construct an excuse, he continues to speak, and it becomes clear he is not really looking for an answer from her. "Apparently not. It seems you may have had an intruder incident earlier today after all." He flattens his palm against the door and eases it shut. His eyes narrow on the crumpled metal where the handle used to be. He fits his index finger into the damage as he reminds her absently, "I thought I told you to stay put."

"You know I don't follow orders well."

"Elena, you need to go back to the bedroom," he informs her without looking at her.

She hesitates, her attention fixed on the yellow afternoon sun seeping through the hole in the door. "Klaus?"

"Back to bed, Elena."

"What are you going to do?"

"It's clear you have a vampire problem. I'm going to take care of it." He turns toward her and grasps her chin. "Be good, and be still. I'll be back in a tick."

The sun goes down, the moon rises, and constellations Elena doesn't remember from her childhood wink in the night sky before Klaus returns with mussed hair and a blood-soaked shirt.

She waits for Klaus to speak first but he never does.

He undresses, showers, comes back with a towel slung low around his hips and his hair pushed out of his face. Elena notices, suddenly, how much his hair has grown since when she met him. It serves as a reminder of how far behind her the sacrifice is—as well as of a memory of him, his hair long and slicked, that she can't quite place.

When he spots her pacing near the window he wraps his arms around her waist and hooks his chin over her shoulder. "And what has Elena all aflutter?"

Her voice sticks like syrup in her throat as she summons the words that just won't come. "I'm just—Did you find the vampire?"

"I did."

"And?"

He twists her around so she faces him and links his fingers with hers. "No need to worry." Klaus leans forward and nuzzles the flesh above her cleavage. "Come to bed," he urges her, even as he dances her backward. Klaus works her sweater over her head and shimmies her pants off of her hips as he propels her down against the aged spring mattress.

She's too distracted and he notices.

"Are we elsewhere?" he asks.

Elena's attention snaps toward her bedmate. His body covers hers, and he has a hand cupped over her pubic mound, but she's not even wet. She realizes some time has passed while she operated on auto-pilot.

Her eyes meet his and she sees something in them she doesn't like. She tries to look away but finds herself caught in his hypnotic blue gaze.

"Are you going to compel me?" she asks, voice hushed.

"And why would I do that?"

Again, she can't give him the answer to his question. She worries, on some level, that he's noticed— _of course he's noticed._ So much easier to talk to him when she had no one to protect— _if_ she still has someone to protect.

He sighs and shifts off of her, but does not pull away from her side. "If I compelled you," he murmurs, "you wouldn't be any different than any other girl with a pretty face."

"You mean any other girl with Tatia Petrova's face."

He clenches his jaw. "Yes, any other girl with Tatia Petrova's face." He rolls his knuckles over her collarbone. "It would be an empty victory if you didn't willingly surrender."

Elena turns toward him, enfolds her arms around him, and tucks her head against his chest. "I already did," she whispers. "At least twice now."

Klaus's fingers tangle in her hair. "I suppose you did."

 

* * *

 

" _Trust me."_

_Elijah's words hang in the air between them as Caroline drives Elena back to Mystic Falls._

_Caroline says nothing the whole of the drive, but her fidgeting fingers and tapping foot betray how anxious she really is._

" _Elijah told us it would be alright," Elena reminds her as they pull in front of the Gilbert house._

" _And you believe him?"_

_Elena considers. "Elijah keeps his word."_

" _Except that time it actually mattered." Caroline yanks the key out of the ignition and stares out of the window._

" _Look, it's his_ family _, Caroline. He knows them best, and if he tells me that it'll be okay…" She tucks her hair behind her ears and lets out a trembling breath. "He's the only way to get Stefan back."_

_Caroline turns to look at her and all of her misgivings seem to melt away. "I know, Elena. I want him back too."_

_Something outside the car catches her attention as the words die on her lips._

_After a few seconds of Caroline's head swiveling like a bird's so she can hear better, Caroline declares, "But_ you're _the one who's going to explain this to Damon. He's waiting for you inside."_

_The wind whispers through the trees, and Elena mistakes it for Caroline calling to her; the house creaks in the equatorial heat and she thinks Tyler must be creeping through the house._

 

* * *

 

Beside her, Klaus's eyes are closed, his breathing is steady, yet she knows better than to depend on the evidence. He's just as likely to open his eyes and rough his hand over her hips as he is to keep sleeping through the night.

She gives up on sleep altogether around midnight.

Thirst burns through her with each dry breath she takes.

She can't drink the water here, but she hopes to find a nightcap.

Elena doesn't dare to turn on the lights as she fumbles her way through dusty kitchen cabinets. She finds a bottle, finally, and even if she can't read the label in the dark, she can nearly guess the proof by the smell of it.

The alcohol— _tequila_ , she thinks—eases the knot that she's been carrying in her chest since mid-afternoon, and after a few healthy swigs she feels ready to go back to bed.

She nearly misses the shadow that darts across the kitchen window.

She has two options, here, and neither are that attractive. If she calls out for Klaus, he _will_ come and he _will_ protect her. If the shadow is Caroline though, or Tyler, she would be signing their death warrants by summoning him. Her desire to protect the ones she loves overrides her desire to survive, as it always does, even though she knows that whatever is out there is probably a threat.

Her instincts tell her to go back to safety and to Klaus, but her heart screams for her to investigate.

She inches toward the glass for a better look—Nothing. Whatever was there has already moved on.

Elena wanders to the back of the house, to the site of her encounter that afternoon. The door is still shut, but it takes no effort at all for Elena to silently pry it open and slip through the threshold.

Caroline steps out of the shadows, Tyler on her heels.

The moon lights their faces in sharp, cruel angles, and they have never looked less human to her. They are too damnably beautiful to be anything but nighttime predators.

Even so.

Tyler approaches her and she holds still as he circles her. After two circuits, he lets out a shaky laugh. "It really is you," he says like he can't believe it.

Caroline hangs back, eyes large and quicksilver bright in the dark.

Elena really wants nothing more than to throw herself at her and never let her go. What she actually does is cradle her arms against her chest as she informs them, "You need to go."

Caroline covers her nose with her hand, the way she does when she doesn't want anyone to know she's crying. "Elena," she mumbles as she swipes the tears from her eyes, "I thought you were dead." Caroline's voice rises and breaks like a wave on the sea. "I'm so, so sorry I attacked you. You know I would never—"

"Elena, who are you with?"

Tyler's voice cuts Caroline short.

She glances toward the bedroom window.

"Elena?" Tyler presses.

" _Klaus._ " The name forms in a dark, mute bubble on her lips.

"Klaus?" Tyler scans the house behind them. His voice drops. "You mean _the_ Klaus?"

"Yes." Truth resonates in her voice.

Caroline swipes at the tears still puddling down her cheeks and stomps her foot, and just like that Elena feels like they're back in high school again and nothing has changed.

"Elena," Caroline breathes. "I thought you were _dead_. I'm not going to let some dumb Original get in between us again."

This is the last thing Elena wants to hear. She hopes Caroline will run far, far away.

Yet she forgets all of her reservations when Caroline bridges the distance between them and clutches her against her. Over Caroline's shoulder, she meets Tyler's eyes. She's forgotten how impossibly dark his they are, how incisive his gaze has become since he first transformed. She shuts her eyes. "I never thought I'd see either of you again."

Caroline pulls back. "Come with us." There's a Caroline Forbes Order in her voice.

"I can't—"

"No. Elena, _come with us_. I don't care what's going on. You can explain later." She holds her hand out as she makes the offer.

Helplessly, Elena takes it.

 

* * *

 


	10. Chapter 10

* * *

 

 

_Caroline presses her hand, and Elena can't help but squeeze back._

She takes a stumbling step forward—another half-step and she'll be close enough for Caroline to sweep her away. Elena remembers a few years ago, when _she_ was the one sweeping _Caroline_ away, taking her dancing, slipping her drinks.

Before she can take that final step, something catches Caroline and Tyler's attention inside the house.

Elena understands what neither is saying.

Klaus is awake.

Elena drops Caroline's hand and backs toward the house.

When Caroline fixes her eyes on her, all Elena can do is shake her head. "I can't," she mouths. "Not tonight."

"I'll find you." Caroline's lips tremble like an anemone. "I'll find you."

Elena nods sharply. "Meet me at the border. I'll—I'll get away."

And then Tyler puts his hand on Caroline's arm. Danger present, he devotes all of his attention to her.

They retreat into the shadows. Nonetheless, Elena keeps her eyes on where she thinks they are until she passes through the doorway of the house.

She slams into him as she clears the threshold.

He's already up and dressed, she discovers with some dismay. _How long had he been awake…?_

"It's not safe to take a midnight stroll, my lovely," he drawls as he leans forward to sip the nighttime scents from her skin.

"I couldn't sleep."

He quirks an eyebrow. "I could probably assist you in that matter…"

Elena swallows his words, rolls up onto her tiptoes and flutters kisses against his lips.

Klaus doesn't bring her back to the bedroom. Rather, he guides her toward the front of the house as he tugs her cotton sleep shirt over her head.

They wind up back in the kitchen, where he lifts her up onto the counter in front of the back window.

A chill runs up her back as the sensation that someone is watching her from the shadows works its way to the front of her mind.

Klaus dips his fingers past the hem of her pajama pants, and even though it's not quite _enough_ , the rough, even stroke of his fingers against her clit pulls her into the same trap she falls into afresh every night.

Wanton in her desire, she hooks her legs around his waist and drags him as close as she can.

He's in the mood to play along tonight, to let her push and pull him as she pleases.

 _This could be the last time_ , she grasps as he curls a second finger inside of her. The realization kindles an urgent need to savor the heat of his flesh under her fingers, the texture of his hair against her cheek, the way his lip quivers and his eyes alight with fascination as he pumps her and her fingers clutch and spasm at his arms.

"You're wearing too many clothes," she husks.

He stands back, awash in silver moonlight, and strips the shirt from his back, the jeans from his pale, narrow hips.

A year ago, Elena thought she knew what the look he gives her meant. It had been all about him, his curse, his desire. Now, Elena understands it might have been about her after all.

Klaus prowls toward her and snatches her into his arms inhumanly fast. The force of it snaps her head back, but she forgets the pain as he twists her pajama pasts past her ankle and angles himself between her legs.

"Tell me you want me," he rasps when he first eases inside of her.

Her breath hitches when he sets the rhythm in a slow, steady rock that makes her legs quake and her ribs creak. "I want you," she sighs.

Klaus's ab muscles roll as his thrusts grow a little harder, a little more jouncing, with each passing stroke.

"You thought of us, like this, even before our little reunion, didn't you, Elena?"

She bites her lip to quell the groan his words seem to call up from deep inside of her.

"When you were all safe and warm in your bed, you thought," he pauses and withdraws, almost completely, before slamming into her to the hilt, "of what it might be like, to let me in."

" _Yes_."

"And I fancy you care about me."

She casts her gaze up into his almost feral one. The question writhes uncomfortably within her, as it always does. "You know I do."

The answers seem to satisfy him, because he doesn't say anything more.

His fingers dig into her thigh and leave bruises like a lake of amethysts against her too-pale flesh as he works himself inside of her. He comes, finally, purring her name and kissing her sweaty shoulders.

Afterward, when he is pulling on his pants and she is searching in the dark for her shirt, he pauses to tell her, "You know, there's no future for you, except for me." He shoots the window a meaningful look.

He brushes past her without another word, and leaves her alone with her horror.

 

* * *

 

_Klaus rises and starts the car early the next morning without a word regarding the previous night._

She follows him outside.

The silence stretches almost too thin as Elena situates herself in the car's low sport seat. They drive through the dust and the sun, and if she sometimes glances back to look for something on the horizon, Klaus doesn't seem to care.

Outside of town, Klaus stops at an abandoned gas station and fills the tank.

"Where are we going?" she asks when he slides back into the driver's seat, hands smelling like gasoline.

"Not so very far. No need to fret." He drums his fingers against the steering wheel before searching his pockets for his sunglasses.

Elena pulls them from the center consul, where he left them two days ago, and hands them to him.

Their fingers touch as he takes the glasses from her. "Thank you." He holds her eyes a fraction longer than necessary.

His attitude is so casual, so light, that Elena begins to hope she has read more into his words than was ever there. _After all_ , she thinks, _this is_ Klaus _. He's prone toward dramatic statements._

They drive for hours, passing beaches situated hundreds of miles inland, crumbling mesas and fresh mountains. The sun cuts a red lancet across the yellowing sky as it plummets westward.

Klaus pulls over in the twilight wilderness. After some time, Elena realizes that he has picked the site of a wind-worn ghost town for the night's rest.

"What's special about this?" she asks, indicating the long line of pueblo houses that seem to crumble each time the wind changes direction. An odd, sulphorous odor seems to ooze from the buildings.

"I knew a witch who lived in this area once. I'm hoping she can give me a bit of… advice."

"The town's deserted. Why would she stick around?"

"No, not deserted, Elena. _Mummified_. You wouldn't be able to see it in the dark, but the entire area is covered in a film of volcanic ash. The whole town suffocated in their sleep."

She shivers, remembering the mountains they had driven past and seeing them now for what they really were.

"So you think this witch survived?" she presses.

"I dare say that was the word in Guadalajara." He doesn't elaborate further, and she doesn't ask him to. Anya Turner's face is still too fresh in her mind.

He doesn't offer her his arm as they stroll down the silent streets, instead trudging a few feet ahead of her. He holds his hand up for her to stop a few times, and leaves her to wait on the street while he disappears into one of the buildings. Each time, he comes out with a fine layer of white film coating his hair and annoyance crinkling his eyes.

"Well," he ventures at length, "I suppose it's the Ferrari for you tonight."

"What?"

"The houses aren't safe for you to wait in, so I'm going to leave you in the car." He smirks and she finds herself relaxes, despite herself. "I trust you won't wreck it?" He dangles the keys in front of her.

"Of course not." Elena holds her hand out and waits for Klaus to give them to her; she knows better than to try taking anything from him he's not ready to relinquish.

He leaves her sitting in the driver's seat, the lights dimmed and the ignition off so as not to attract any attention.

For a while, she leans back in the chair and shuts her eyes.

A clap of lightning wakes her. Thunder rolls through the empty planes a moment later, and then thick sheets of rain hammer the car. She surmises that, even with hybrid keen hearing, the rain would block all other sounds out.

Elena decides, at that point, without too much thought. She sticks the keys in the ignition and pulls onto the road.

The ghost town and Klaus slip into the distance, and then out of sight altogether as she heads North.

The rain pounds the ground flat and washes all traces of her car—her tracks, the smell of the exhaust, the sound of the motor humming—into the wild.

Elena drives until dawn, when the car runs out of gas and the rain lightens to a hazy mist. It sputters just as she pulls past the Arizona boarder and gets out to walk.

She doesn't walk long until she finds another car, sitting alone against the skyline. Elena approaches it warily, aware that it is just as likely to hold danger as it is to hold her future.

Caroline bursts from the car and bolts to her side. "Are you here alone?"

"Yes. I left him last night."

Tyler rolls down the window and promptly spots the Ferrari. "That's his?" He whistles through his teeth. "We need to get out of here _yesterday_ if you stole that."

She gets into the back of their car and lets herself hope, _just this once_ _ **,**_ for the future.

Together, the three of them leave the boarder, leave Klaus, and never look back.

It's odd, at first, because, try as they might to continue fitting the puzzle back together where they left off, too many pieces have been lost or damaged in the mean time.

Yet all the same, Caroline is still Caroline—clingy, neurotic, and so, so kindhearted—and Tyler is still Tyler—aggressive, defensive, and surprisingly sweet-tempered.

They don't dare pull over, but there is so much to say, so much to catch up on—

"So we were in Malibu—it _was_ Malibu, wasn't it, Tyler?"

"Yeah, Malibu."

"—And all the houses were _empty—_ "

"The ones that were left. Tsunami got all the ones too close to the ocean."

"—and we found a bunch that didn't even have invitation barriers on them, so we could just walk in and hang there." Caroline smiles like she still relishes the memory. " _Elena_ , you should have _seen_ the closets in some of these houses."

"Caroline practically wouldn't let us leave," Tyler confirms with an affectionate smirk.

They spend two days driving, never stopping except for when they find a gas station that still has any gas. Sometimes they pass through towns where the people are still staggering on, and while Tyler and Elena are inclined to drive the fastest through those, Caroline usually turns her hungry eyes on them in pretty much the same way as a puppy-dog. At dusk on the third night, they end up pulling over in one of those towns so she can get a bite to eat.

Caroline disappears as soon as she is out of the car, without a word about when she'll be back, and it's all Elena can do to yell, "Be careful!" after her and hope she hears.

"Is this common?" she asks Tyler as they lean against the side of the car and wait.

"Yeah," he admits, rubbing the back of his head self-consciously. "But usually I go with her, you know? I get kinda nervous when she's out there by herself."

"Why? Caroline's been taking care of herself for years."

"She gets careless when she goes this long without feeding." He trails off, leaving her to fill in the blanks.

"Then you're only here because I am." She hugs herself as the déjà vu unfurls in her gut. "It's my fault she hasn't fed. We have to find her."

"No. Like you said—Caroline's been taking care of herself for years. She's a _vampire_. You're only human. If there _is_ something going on, it's best you stay away and we wait for Caroline to meet back up with us."

"I don't think I'm worth everything that's happened because of me."

He smiles, just the smallest crook of his lips, like he's telling her a secret she should already know. "Don't you know, Elena? You're worth _everything_ that's happened— seeing you again—Caroline's been happier in the last five days than I've seen her since before the sacrifice." He turns toward her, his back to the woods and the town beyond it and Caroline herself, and tucks a piece of hair behind her ear. "Elena, _you're_ worth it." He pauses, and Elena thinks he's going to tease her for the tears she feels gathering in her eyes, but when he opens his mouth, a clot of red blood oozes from his lips.

Slowly, her eyes trail down to catch on the scarlet stain spreading like a flower over Tyler's t-shirt, before he crumples into a heap on the ground.

"Hello, my dear." Klaus stands less than a foot away from her as he flicks Tyler's blood from his fingers. "Long time no see."

 

* * *

 

_Amid the horrors of those months, Caroline somehow finds happiness._

_Tyler Lockwood tries his hand at another go with her, and this time there's no Matt standing in the way._

_Elena barely pays attention when Caroline, giddy and kissed properly for the first time since she was turned, announces that she's with Tyler. "As in_ with _with."_

" _What about Matt?" Elena asks more out of habit than anything else—the rest of her focus goes to the map she has in one hand and the text she's about to send Elijah in the next. She glances up at Caroline when she doesn't immediately respond._

" _Matt—Matt doesn't have anything to do with me and Tyler." She bites her lip. "He's better off not getting involved."_

_Elena sets her phone down. "Do you still care about Matt?"_

" _Is it bad if I do?"_

_StefanDamonStefan strobes through her mind._

" _No," she answers carefully. "Not if you're certain you can put aside your feelings for Matt if you choose to be with Tyler."_

 _Caroline gives her a real, slow smile, and it's probably the sweetest look Elena's ever seen on the other girl's face. "I still care about Matt. But I_ love _Tyler, you know?"_

_Elena doesn't know. She loves too many._

_She thinks about that conversation the day Matt dies._

_The Grill catches fire, along with most of downtown, and Matt refuses to abandon the building while there are people still inside. Never mind that he is just a human boy, that there is nothing he can do. He goes anyway, and he dies._

_It's only later, when Tyler pulls Caroline from Matt's unrecognizable remains that they notice—Jeremy, alive and coughing, even though his clothes are burned to cinders. Gray ash dulls the blue shimmer of the ring on his finger._

" _Bonnie," he coughs as he sits up. "Where's Bonnie?"_

_They put it all together later, as they huddle together in Caroline's house._

_Jeremy sits with his head in his hands, thumping his foot against the floor. He looks about ready to explode._

" _Go over it again," Damon orders, voice tight, when Jeremy's fidgeting begins to bother him._

" _We were eating dinner at the Grill. A man walked in who I didn't recognize, and came to our table. He—he wanted Bonnie to go with him, but when he touched her arm she saw something—"_

" _What?"_

" _I don't know. Something bad."_

_Alaric, who has been leaning against the door-jam, speaks for the first time. "What about the fire? How did that start?"_

" _I dunno, magic I guess." Jeremy moans in agony. "I was helpless. The fire started and I couldn't do anything to stop him. And now Bonnie's—"_

_Damon grabs Jeremy by the shoulders and cuts through his despair. "Bonnie's missing. Not dead. Missing."_

_In the silence that yawns between them, they can all hear Caroline sobbing in the next room. Tyler may be in there with her, but he doesn't seem to be doing much good._

_Elena leaves the debriefing and heads toward the bedrooms situated at the back of the house._

_Damon's voice wafts after her. "He must've been a witch. If he was after Bonnie for one of the Originals—"_

_She finds the door to Caroline's room ajar, Caroline curled toward the window, her knees tucked to her chest and her sheets wet with tears, and Tyler leaning over her, brushing the hair from her face. His whole body shakes, like he's trying to keep something caged that can't be contained for long._

" _Leave her to me."_

_Tyler looks up at her._

_Elena knows what she must look like. Her own dry-eyed sobs had ended hours ago; she had pulled it all together, as she's done more times than she can count, and the impassive face she presents to Tyler must disturb him._

_He hesitates._

" _Elena?" Caroline sits up and wipes her face with the back of her hand. "Is—is Bonnie really gone too?"_

_Elena creeps toward the bed, almost like she's afraid to make any sudden movements. "Yes."_

" _Do you think she's dead?"_

_Elena perches next to Caroline, wraps her arms around the other girl and tucks her against her breast. Caroline's curls have tangled in the salt of her tears; they feel like seaweed in her hands as she strokes her hair._

" _No."_

_Tyler stands, gives them space._

_Elena gestures with her chin for him to join the others in the living room._

_Left alone with Caroline, she doesn't know what to say—but that's the thing. She doesn't need to say anything at all, because this is_ Matt _, and this is_ Bonnie _, and in so many ways, they're the only ones who feel both losses._

_Damon comes in to check on them before he leaves. "I'll take care of Jeremy," he tells her before he slips out the door. Alaric and Tyler leave soon after._

_When the house is quiet, and the only sound Elena can hear is her own breathing, she decides she cannot withhold from the inevitable any longer._

" _I don't know what's going to happen," she confesses._

_Caroline draws back to look at her. "What do you mean?"_

" _Caroline. I want you and Tyler to leave and never look back. Get out while you two still have a chance at some kind of happiness."_

" _You know I can't. My mom—"_

" _Get your mom to go with you."_

 _Caroline clasps her hand between her own. "_ No, _Elena. I belong here."_

_Elena frowns. "Just promise me—when things get bad—that you'll consider it?"_

" _You mean because they haven't already gotten bad," she mumbles._

" _Fine. When things get_ worse **.** _Just—promise me."_

" _Okay. Fine. I promise. Happy?"_

" _Not really."_

_The earthquake tears the town asunder not long after that._

_It rains during Jeremy's funeral._

_Caroline shows up, sans Tyler, and stands next to Elena when Damon shovels dirt into the grave._

" _What are you going to do now, Elena?" Caroline asks her._

" _I don't know."_

" _Will you live with Damon?"_

" _I don't know."_

" _Will you be okay?"_

" _I don't know."_

_Caroline looks away, toward town._

_(Or what is left of it. The earthquake had left a huge fissure through the heart of the residential area. Elena only learns later that both Sheriff Forbes and Mrs. Lockwood were amongst the bodies now resting at the bottom of that crevice.)_

" _I don't really feel like talking, if that's okay," Elena finally tells her. After all: There's nothing to be said that hasn't already been said each time this has happened before._

" _Yeah, Elena. Of course."_

_The sound of Damon working in the mud and the heat of the earth fills her ears. He's been oddly quiet through all of this, save for that steady chink of metal shovel against raw earth._

_Caroline lingers a little longer, like there is something else she wants to say—knowing Caroline, there probably is—but she never gets around to it. She presses Elena's hand, and Elena can't help but squeeze back. She leaves without saying goodbye._

_The day Damon lays Jeremy's body in the earth is the last time Elena sees Caroline._

_Until._

 

* * *

 

" _Hello, my dear. Long time no see."_

Before Elena can deal with what has just happened, Caroline returns.

Caroline spots Tyler first— _of course_ —screams, runs toward him—only to be tossed aside like a ragdoll by Klaus, who pins her to a tree on the periphery of Elena's night vision. He looks to Elena, and Elena _knows_ that nothing will happen to Caroline if she's not looking right at him to witness his revenge.

Tyler gasps and wheezes on the ground like a beached fish—relief surges through Elena that he is even still alive.

She ducks down next to him to inspect the damage. She can't see very well in the dark, and she worries that touching him might disrupt the delicate balance of chance and luck keeping him alive.

"I've punctured his lungs," Klaus calls out helpfully. "They're collapsing as we speak. He'll smother to death soon."

Elena grasps Tyler's hand as she addresses Klaus. She refuses to look at Klaus, or at Caroline, lest he take her attention as a cue to kill his captive.

"What do I have to do to make this right?" she asks.

"Sorry, love, this isn't about making it right. Now, we've already had this conversation, remember? In Canada?"

She ignores the bait and presses, "Then what is it about?"

"I told you, precious girl, what I would do to any vampire who attempted to take you from me."

Out of the corner of her eye, she can see his hand tighten around Caroline's throat.

Caroline's whimper breaks her heart.

"What will you get out of killing my friends?"

"Satisfaction."

"And then what? We go back to la vive bohème?"

"Hardly."

A cloud moves, the moon comes out, and a beam of light illuminates a gleam of metal at Tyler's hip that Elena had completely missed before.

Before she has time to hesitate, she snatches the knife from Tyler's pocket and presses it against her abdomen. The cold of the steel pressing into her side is at once familiar and terrible. She's done this before. She can remember the time at her lakehouse, _but she also seems to remember another time that she took a knife to herself, in an old, barebones room she half recognizes. Yes. Both times there had been a vampire there to heal her. There had been Stefan and then there had been Rose with long hair and an old dress—_

"And what have we here?" Klaus laughs derisively. "Am I supposed to fall for this trick? I'm not my brother. There's no trick dagger you can use to save your friends."

"I'm not betting on whether or not you think I'll do it. We both know I have before and I will again."

Klaus holds Caroline by the scruff of the neck and pushes her in front of him. He settles his hands on her shoulders. "Then what are you betting on?"

Elena's seen this before—the moment just before the execution.

She drags the knife higher, so it sits under her left breast. If she plunges the knife in here, she will die before anyone can do a thing to save her. "I'm betting on you being unable to let me."

Klaus throws Caroline aside and stalks toward her. "Careful now, Elena. You're playing with fire."

"I'm not afraid of fire anymore."

Tyler's gasps sputter.

Caroline lurches to her feet to get to Tyler, but Klaus catches her again easily. In another moment, Tyler will die, and Caroline will follow very soon after. All to teach her a lesson.

He's played her hand for her, and there's really nothing more for her to do—the bite of the steel nips through her soft breast and works it's way between the bone of the ribcage.

Klaus crushes all the bones in her wrist when he catches the blade.

She screams, but the sound gets drowned as Klaus shoves his bloody palm against her mouth and forces her to drink.

In all her time with him, Elena has never seen him truly enraged—until now.

"Don't _ever_ do that again, do you understand me, Elena?"

She tries to shove him away but he doesn't move. "I'll do whatever I have to do." She spits. "Now are you going to let Caroline heal Tyler before it's too late?"

"What if I say no?"

"I'm not going to live in this world without them in it."

The anger still stirs in his eyes.

She'll pay for this later, she knows.

"Caroline, is it?" he calls. "Be a dear and pick your werewolf friend off the ground."

Caroline flings herself at Tyler, rips into her wrist and fusses over him until he pushes her away to stare at the tableau Klaus and she must present.

Klaus links his hand with the one that had lately held the knife and tugs her toward the deep of the woods.

Elena gets one last look at Caroline and Tyler—just enough time to mouth the words, " _Never look back_ " before Klaus sweeps her away.

 

* * *

 

_In a new car the next day, Elena thinks about her time with Caroline and Tyler and wonders if it were all a mirage._

Klaus has barely spoken to her since she almost killed herself. She can't wrap her mind around what it means that he refuses to let her die. She doesn't really try to.

There are no road maps where they are heading, and no landmarks to tell her where they are.

"Where are we going?" she asks when the mirage settles into the distance, unattainable once more.

"Somewhere far, far away."

 

* * *

 


	11. Chapter 11

* * *

 

 

" _I want to show you something."_

He wakes her up with those words, and for a long minute Elena wonders if she's wandered into a dream _(or maybe a memory)_.

She sits curled against the passenger door, the sun beating orange light against her cheek.

They've been driving for days now, retracing their steps across the North America without stopping longer than it takes to scrounge through pantries for a meal or refill the tank with gas.

From the various signs edging the skyline, Elena takes it they're all the way to New York City—or what's left of it.

She can't quite believe it.

When they had arrived in Philadelphia, all those months ago, Klaus had told her _New York is still hobbling on_. She had pictured the city as she remembered it from childhood, perhaps overlaid with images from the Great Depression. The actuality—the burnt out skyscrapers, the roving, wild-eyed youth that could spawn a flash mob in seconds if they scented food—makes what she imagined seem like a fairytale.

 _All the same_ , she thinks against her guilt. She's safe, so long as Klaus is with her.

He takes her to an apartment in an expensive looking high-rise that tips precariously toward the street.

Walking through the hallways reminds her of the fun-houses that used to come up with the fair. She trails her fingers along the trembling walls, finding her balance when the building groans around them by leaning her weight against the cool plaster. Once, she loses her footing and almost falls through a broken window. Her legs see-saw toward the stilted skyline before Klaus catches her by the wrist and pulls her back inside. "What are we even looking for?" she asks as the ground shutters and shakes beneath her feet.

He stops, just then, and produces a key to one of the apartments. "I left my belongings here before I left for Virginia—you remember the event, I'm sure. I'd like to reclaim them." Klaus leads her inside and leaves her near a row of low art deco couches and a cracked glass table that shatters when she sets her jacket on it.

Elena has never been in one of Klaus's actual homes before. After all of the places they have visited, after watching how he took over Alaric's place and made it his own, she had supposed he commandeered houses everywhere he went. It strikes her as profoundly stupid, profoundly unknowledgeable, that she should have assumed such things about him at all.

As far as she can tell, there are no personal items in the outer rooms. She wonders what could be important enough for him to return for—it isn't as though he has an entourage of family coffins anymore.

The furnishings (those that have not burst apart like the table) are sleek, consciously modern pieces that must be nearing ninety years old. They all speak toward a certain sensibility that sparks a stray memory of Klaus speaking through Alaric's lips— _I much prefer the 20s. You know, the style, the parties, the_ jazz.

She can hear him down the hall, routing through one of the bedrooms.

Curious, she follows the noise down an unlit hallway to what are obviously the bedrooms. As she nears the door, she can make out his silhouette in the dim afternoon sun.

He leans over a black leather bag, stuffing— _what?_ memorabilia?—into inside of it. He sorts stray pieces of jewelry into different pockets ( _Elena wonders if they're mementos or, like most jewelry she's encountered in the last few years, something_ more), and wraps aging leather books in cloth before tucking them into the bag's main cavern. Last, he picks up a small, yellowing sheet of paper—no— _vellum_. Something shifts in his face, some emotion she has only glimpsed when he does not think she's paying attention.

She cannot help but feel as though she has intruded upon something private.

Elena retreats back into the hall to wait.

A western-facing door stands ajar down the hall. Light peaks through around the edges, and Elena dreamily wanders toward it almost without meaning to.

The room looks like whoever was here last left in a hurry. The bed lays unmade, sheets crumpled at the foot. One of the armoire doors stands open, the other crooked closed.

Elena steps into the room, closes the armoire door, and almost trips on the duffel bag lying open on the floor.

A journal she recognizes too well slides out between the zippers.

 

* * *

 

_I've heard rumors, from other vampires, about something happening in Virginia. As always, all roads lead to Elena._

"I see you've found Stefan's things."

Elena turns from her place on the floor, where she has been immersing herself in Stefan's journal entries, to find Klaus leaning against the door-jam, the black bag she had seen him packing slung over his shoulder.

She hugs the open pages against her chest, as though that could keep him from taking them from her. She wants to ask— _was that the point of this trip? to test me again?_ —but he clutches his bag too tightly for her to dismiss whatever his private agenda may be.

"If you'd like," Klaus continues as he steps into the room, "you can take them with you."

"Why would you let me do that?" Her suspicion bleeds through the words.

He places his bag next to Stefan's and squats down beside her, so that their eyes are on the same level. "You know, when I first told Stefan we were paying a visit to my family in Virginia, I couldn't fathom why he was so eager to go. I'd thought a big, messy battle like that would be the sort of thing a sensible chap would seek to avoid. In retrospect, though, I have to wonder if it wasn't _Stefan_ who truly wanted to move south, and if I wasn't just bending to his desires because it seemed like the right idea." He thumbs a stray tear out of her eye. "You see, he _knew_ you were there, in danger, and he was determined to save you, consequences be damned."

"Why would you listen to Stefan?" she croaks. His story confirms all of the fears Elena's been brooding on for the last six months—namely, that Stefan would not have been there that morning had it not been for her.

"I don't know if you're aware, but Stefan and I went back almost a century." At her frown, he gestures toward the journal in her arms. "The story's in there, somewhere, I'm sure." Klaus's eyes glaze, and if Elena concentrates, she can almost envision what he sees. A chandelier, a champagne fountain, and warm bodies, swaying—

Abruptly, the spell breaks.

Klaus touches his hand to her forearm and traces the angle of her ulna. "I don't begrudge Stefan whatever claim he once had on you. Just as I don't begrudge you for taking him from me." He rises and pauses at the door. "I don't fancy spending the night here. The building's likely to topple any moment. Will you be ready soon, my dear?" He's not really looking for an answer, because they'll leave when he's ready, no sooner, no later. Yet the empty words fill the dead space between them all the same.

Long after he leaves, his words ring in her ears.

_He was determined to save you, consequences be damned._

Her question: Did he succeed?

 

* * *


	12. Chapter 12

* * *

 

 

_Ultimately, she's just a girl with a familiar face._

He turns those words over in his mind like a talisman as he waits for her to run again.

Against his expectations, she never does.

Instead, after New York, Elena spends her days huddled up with Stefan's journals, content to let the world slide by.

He can't say he knows what's in them. Usually, he would make a greater effort to control the flow of information to Elena—he's shut her out of his plans to this point, and he can't say how long his secrets can last against the slow turn of the page.

Cautious of what they might say, he picks one up while she showers and reads a few pages. Each sentence recounts another blood-soaked episode in gory, exquisite detail. If anything, he's surprised that none of it seems to upset or excite Elena, one way or the other.

 

* * *

 

_Elena's been waiting now, for a few weeks, for Klaus to shatter the quiet._

Knowledge born from experience whispers that _no one_ crosses Klaus and escapes his consequences.

She's not sure what perturbs her more: that he hasn't yet meted out his retribution, or that she doubts he ever will.

In the mean time, Stefan's fluid, familiar handwriting waltzes her through the hours of each morning, afternoon, and evening. She reads his journal first for the simple pleasure of hearing his voice again in the rhythm of his words, the selection of sounds. The second time she reads it, she lingers on his handwriting, tracing her fingers over each looping L, imagining the emotion that had fueled each slashing T. Stefan burns forever just out of reach.

Elena runs after him because it is all she knows how to do.

Hazy weeks pass before she actually reads the contents on the page. Once she does, she reads it through carefully once, then shuts the journal and doesn't look at it again.

 

* * *

 

_The day arrives when there's no one around for him to eat._

Rumor (and a few pointed questions) leads Klaus, and in turn Elena, to the Maine coast.

Midwinter snow smothers the land, and once he discovers that the region has been without electricity since the spring, he resorts to building Elena a primitive fire to keep her warm while he investigates the area further.

His inquiries yield nothing but an abandoned fishing cottage, the soot in the fireplace not even a week old. He almost overlooks the burnt paper fragments buried in the grey ash. Carefully, he extracts them from the mess and fits together what he can. It all seems to indicate a northern trajectory, so he decides to move toward Nova Scotia.

After abandoning the cottage, he spends _hours_ combing through the area. The only heart beat he hears is his own.

He doesn't go home that night, instead preferring to shift into a wolf and continue hunting. The sun rises, sets, and still nothing can be scavenged. Even the carrion in this region have died out. When the moon rises a second time, he decides to cut his losses and move on, confidant in finding a more prosperous community.

The north turns out to be worse than the south. Only his determination to _catch_ drives him onward, and he soon regrets his stubborn fixation with _this_ , his latest project.

In all his time as a vampire, he has never experienced desiccation, never known what it is like to be cognizant of the little remaining blood muddling through his veins.

The _easy_ solution beats against the base of his skull with each passing, ravenous moment.

For a time, he shakes it off and continues to prowl through the wilderness.

When he _does_ return to Elena, even he cannot say how the encounter will unfold.

He lingers at the doorway.

She hasn't noticed him yet, focused as she is on brushing the day's tangles from her hair. She is cuttingly beautiful, standing barefoot in a yellow sundress he had picked for her in an abandoned South Carolina mall.

He steps closer to her and freezes. The steady throb of Elena's blood through her veins appeals to the hollow ache in his stomach in a way he cannot ignore. He remembers the weight of her blood on his tongue, the heat of the flames fanning his face as he devoured her entirely. The reverberating thud when he dropped her body to the ground, an empty vessel.

For once, he cannot bring himself to take everything he wants from the doppelganger.

Elena starts as he wraps his arms around her waist and spreads his fingers over the swell of her hips.

He hikes up her sundress and inhales deeply, focusing on the scent of her blooming arousal rather than the hypnotic pull of her blood. He traces a finger up the inside of her thigh and relishes the way she shivers against him.

The hunger fades into the background.

Elena rolls her hips, deliberate in her desire for him in a way she never would have been before. She fits her hand over his and urges him toward her heated center. She becomes wetter as he traces her sex through the thin material of her underwear. Her fingers trace his hand up to his wrist and clamp against the bone. The pressure doesn't hurt, but from the whitening of her knuckles he knows she clutches him as tightly as she can.

He tugs her underwear aside and slips a finger inside of her.

She slicks him up to the knuckle, traps his hand between her thighs as she clenches against him. There's something about her, today, an easiness that should have warned him. But he's too immersed in her, in the languid sensation of building her toward orgasm. She catches him off-guard completely when she leans back and nips him along his jawline.

Blood boils underneath his skin, veins rise beneath his eyes, and he can feel the scrape of his elongating canines against his lips. His vision tunnels as the change happens. When it clears, his sight narrows in on the scar he left her last year. He dips his head and fastens his mouth over the jagged stripe of raised skin. Just the smallest increase in pressure, and he will have all of her.

A millennium of waiting for this girl weighs against his visceral desires.

He takes his teeth from her neck and loosens his hands from her body and draws away from her.

What a mess she looks. The dress catches high over one hip, exposing the trail of moisture dripping down her leg to plain sight. The straps slide further down her shoulders with each breath, accentuating a fresh bruise flowering along the side of her neck.

Elena worries her lip as she studies him. She seems perpetually on the verge of saying something to him, these days, but never does.

He's grateful to her for her silence.

Finally, she asks him, "Is there a reason you haven't been coming home? Did something happen?"

"That doesn't concern you."

She swallows and cradles the bruise. "I think it might. Is there something… _wrong_?" She forms the question like she doesn't understand what she's asking.

He leers at her, displays all of his teeth for her to examine. "I'm a touch famished. You see, it appears we've stumbled into a dead-zone."

She steps toward him with all of the brazen foolishness he's always liked about her. "How long has it been since you fed?" she asks, her voice a low current rippling through the room.

He doesn't respond to her question, and from the spark that alights in her eyes, he doesn't think she ever expected him to.

Slowly, she lowers her hand from the bruise and tilts her head to the side. She doesn't say anything at all, but the suggestion sits between them nonetheless. It's an unasked for offer he hadn't ever expected her to give, and a gift he would never be able to refuse.

 

* * *

 

_Slowly, he leans forward to lay his mouth over hers; he doesn't linger there long before he pulls back and, taking her chin in his hand, murmurs to her, "Thank you, Elena."_

His fangs press into her flesh, repuncturing the scar she now wears like a love-token around her throat.

Helplessly, she presses herself against his chest, flattening her hands against his back as he takes long, hard pulls from her body.

Maybe it had been stupid, reckless, to give him this—yet she hadn't cared.

She can feel Klaus, shifting inside of her, teeth tight against her tendons as his cheek nuzzles against her skin.

The last time they did this, he had been a cherished nightmare. Elena does her best, now, to focus on that just-out-of-reach memory of what she had imagined Klaus to be, _before_ , if only to distract herself from the alarming heaviness she feels in her limbs.

Her legs collapse, and he seems to take that as his cue to disengage. He catches her easily enough, and brings her over to an armchair sitting by the bed.

Everything shifts out of focus. Suddenly, the red ringing his mouth is too bright, the room smells too stale, and the very air presses too aggressively against her chest as she tries to breathe.

Klaus kneels in front of her, thumbing away the last of her blood from his lips and sucking the digit clean. Finished, he takes her wrist and checks her pulse somewhat casually, as though he's been through this procedure an innumerable number of times.

"Moved a bit too fast," he says to himself. "Perhaps in future…" He trails off.

She nods. There's no need for him to finish the sentence—

"Perhaps in future I'll be a bit more… careful."

 _Care_ ful.

Elena will never mention it to him, but she sees, whenever he looks at her these days, how much he cares for her.

 

* * *

 

_The car sputters to a halt, one day, before they reach their destination._

Klaus steers the car onto the road's shoulder and offers Elena a hand out of the car.

No sooner is Elena out of the car than she pulls out a brown leather rucksack and adjusts it across her shoulders. She carries the rucksack filled with Stefan's belongings everywhere they go. He hasn't seen her looking through them in weeks. Just carrying them along, a dead weight on her shoulders.

"What are you doing?" she asks him as he takes the bag from her and swings it onto his own shoulder. Separation from Stefan's things leaves her more agitated than he would like.

Elena grabs at the straps and he has to hold the bag out of her reach to keep her from snatching it back. "Don't worry, I'm not going to harm your precious cargo." He pushes her hands away from him. "We'll move faster if I carry these for you, sweetheart."

She glances back at the car. "We're walking?" She peers around her and seems to understand. "There's no more gas, is there."

"Afraid not. Gasoline this side of the pond's running a bit scarce. It's probably best to abandon the car." He tells her the news as he fishes behind the driver's seat for his own bag.

"So what are we going to do? Where are we going to go?"

He gives her an unpleasant smile. "Trying to figure that out at the very moment, love."

"Are—" She hesitates over the thought, teeth pricking at her lower lip. He thinks about how he would like to feel that soft flesh under his own teeth. The image has him considering taking her against the hood of the car when she ventures, "You're looking for someone—someone _specific_ , I mean—"

Klaus uses his superior speed to get in her face. No matter how long she stays with him, he does not think she can ever become truly accustomed to him, intimate enough with him, for her face not to blanch when he moves like this.

"And, pray tell, Elena, my dear, where did you get _that_ idea?"

She gestures toward the bag he carries for her.

"Stefan's journals. They… conjecture."

"Oh? What about?"

"We've talked a lot about how you're seeking out witches." She shrugs. "It just seems to me like maybe you're looking for a _particular_ witch. At least, that's what Stefan seemed to have thought."

"Did his journals say anything else?"

She shoves her hands in her back pockets and compresses her lips into a pale cicatrize line that gashes across her pretty face.

"Come on, now, Elena, let's not make this difficult."

"Like I said, it was conjecture. Stefan was never sure what would happen when you found the witch. I just know what happens to the people you hunt." Her words are truthful enough. It's to her benefit that they align pretty well with what he suspects Stefan to have known.

He bares his teeth. "A shrewd deduction. It _won't_ end well for the witch I seek." He cocks his head to the side as he considers her. "And yet, you haven't raised a single indignant plea toward my higher virtues."

"It seemed unnecessary."

He's intrigued. He circles her in a slow, deliberately predatory arc. He pauses, at an angle just behind her right shoulder, and murmurs into her ear, "Do mine eyes deceive me? Is this really the pure and honorable Elena standing before me?"

She turns around and rolls her eyes at him. "Simply _Elena_ will do just fine, thanks."

Klaus drops the bags on the side of the road and pinions her against his body. "Elena, Elena," he hums. "You're so much _more_ than that." He strokes the length of her ribcage and kisses the side of her neck, just below her ear. He decides to ravish her here after all.

 

* * *

 

_After their conversation on the road, Elena considers burning Stefan's journals._

Not that anything in them implicitly states what she's worked out for herself—but the puzzle pieces are all there, and Klaus is much, much more intelligent than she is.

She curses herself for bringing the topic up with Klaus in the first place, berates herself for questioning him—and yet she had to know whether Stefan had been on the right tract when he had written, _Klaus has discovered that there is a witch a hundred times stronger than all of the others who fights in his sister's army. He went alone to consult a circle in upstate New York. From what I've gathered, they all seem to agree: finding her is the only hope of restoring the balance._

Stefan had left off there, as if he were afraid to reveal too much.

None of it matters. Klaus had only confirmed the inevitable answer Elena had hoped to avoid.

Somewhere out there, Elena knows that Bonnie Bennett is still alive, and that Klaus is looking for her.

 

* * *

 


	13. Chapter 13

* * *

 

 

_He hasn't mentioned anything to Elena, yet—he will have to, soon._

Elena's still asleep, her long, sun-browned legs kicked out of the sheets. She's commandeered one of his dark olive tee-shirts for sleep; the cotton would engulf her down to mid-thigh if it weren't bunched at her hips. It's more than possession that he feels when he looks at her asleep in his bed, garbed in the fabric he wears pressed to his skin. When he looks at her, he feels—

"Klaus," she murmurs into her pillows. She sleep-sighs and her eyes flutter open.

It's in these little moments, early in the morning when she first wake or in mid-afternoon when he turns on a jazz record and she ventures a musician's name, face open as she looks to him for confirmation, that he knows he has won her.

She reaches for him and snakes her arms around his neck when he leans into her embrace.

"What are you thinking of?" she asks him as he lifts her from the mattress and brings her to the French doors overlooking a sloping balcony.

"Mmm, how much I adore looking at you in the sunlight."

If she were another girl, she might giggle. But she is _Elena_. Only the barest satisfaction reaches her lips.

Nonetheless, she pulls him down for a kiss, and the taste of her drives him marvelously mad.

He's become drugged on the feel of her warm, parted legs, on the sound of her heart jumping beneath her fragile breast-bone. Elena dilutes him, slips through his blood until all he wants is _her._ He's addicted to the sight of her, to those dark eyes that have haunted him past reason.

"Outside," she gasps against his mouth. "Let's go outside."

Wordlessly, he kicks the doors open and brings her into the morning light.

The steel beams supporting the balcony are warped dramatically; the balcony itself cascades toward the ground below.

Klaus is careful, when he sets Elena down, to keep his hands on her waist lest she lose her footing.

"You're far too pale," he tells her upon observation.

"Then make love to me outside more often." She pauses, after she says it, her eyes wide and steady on his face while she waits for his reaction. They've never called it _love making_ before—always fucking, between them, always about the slick slide of their flesh and the hungry want for more than the other has to offer.

"Is that what you want, sweetheart? For this to be about _love_?" The words sound nasty even to his own ears.

She flinches, but, willful creature that she is, she holds her ground. She shrugs out of his grasp and steps back, onto the teetering balcony. "It was a slip of the tongue. I don't have any illusions about what we are."

Unsavory disappointment worms through him. He covers the feeling easily, though, with a quirk of his eyebrows and a rough hand pressed hot against her abdomen. "Glad to see we're on the same page, then, love." He sinks to his knees as he speaks, nudges her thighs apart and hooks one of Elena's legs over his shoulder.

She almost topples over but catches herself on his shoulders. "What are you doing?" she asks, leaning her weight against his bones to steady herself.

"Are you braced?"

"Yes?"

He doesn't test her balance. He supposes he'll catch her fast enough if she loses her grip.

She jolts against him, legs atremble. "Stop breathing like that. It tickles."

"Always ticklish," he chides her. "Never the _proper_ reaction to a man between your legs."

"You're not a man."

"Ah. Well." He bites the inner corner of her thigh—Elena moans, writhes closer to him—"Never the proper reaction to a monster between your legs either." He leaves an open-mouthed kiss against the ringed bruise he's left on her thigh, before turning his attention to her clothes. She's soaked through her panties; he touches his nose to her through the fabric and inhales the scent of her. This close, he can feel her breath hitch in her lungs as he brushes against her clit.

Klaus pulls back and runs a finger along the length of her opening. It's this very thing, the Petrova _belle chose_ , that has always been his undoing. He pushes the fabric aside and slips in a finger, palm cradling Elena's swollen sex.

She opens like a flower in his hand, aromatic, circadian. Her juices drip down his fingers, over his knuckles, as he plucks at her nerve endings. Without thinking he brings his wet hand to his mouth and sucks the digits clean. The taste of her, exquisite, familiar, _the same._

_This girl._

The thought fragments even as it forms, for Elena leans forward and places her lips against his pulse, just as he's trying to push through the haze of her. Elena marches a trail of kisses up the side of his face, her eyelashes whispering against his cheek like a crawl of ants. She swipes her tongue against the grain of his stubble and clearly relishes the way it makes him shudder. "When was the last time you shaved?" she teases him, voice a girlish sigh on the breeze.

He responds by tearing her clothing from her, until it is just _Elena,_ her soft flesh and her own thick desire for him. He likes seeing to her as he does this morning, wallows in these daily gratifications of putting his mouth to her quim and teasing the pleasure from her stubborn body.

Elena rocks against him, round hips and lithe legs—asking for something she once didn't know how to, and now doesn't think not to.

He palms her ass and pulls her closer, spreads her legs apart further with his shoulders. Would she have bucked so shamelessly against him a few months ago? Would the girl he took by the hand like a bride to lead to her death nearly tear his hair from his scalp, be so eager to let him fuck her with his tongue?

He's satisfied with this girl, with her hunger for him and her deadly eyes.

Perhaps he's the one with the illusions (with Petrova women, he reminds himself, illusion is all that's ever real).

And yet. They are a thousand years removed from her legacy, removed by crashing continents and tumbling seas from her Petrova inheritance.

In a way, he doesn't really mind this world, cannot seriously blame her for awakening his family, when as a consequence he can spend his days satiating himself with her body, her blood, learning the turnings of her mind and the flavor of her fear. When he knows, now, how to get the lovely Elena off with the barest pressure of his tongue, when he is privy to the way her blood beats and pulses as arousal pools between her legs if he slides his mouth against her at the right tempo, the right angle.

He doesn't really mind this world, because he has Elena to himself, and that is just the way he likes it.

 

* * *

 

_Sometimes she feels like a juggler, like she has Klaus's ambitions in one hand and her secrets in the other, but she can never hold them securely away from each other, because in the air, falling, is Bonnie._

"Why is this witch so important?" she asks him as she scrapes dried blood from her shirt collar.

He takes the shirt from her hands and tosses it aside. "That stain's not going to come out without some soap."

"We don't have soap."

He shrugs. "I guess you'll have to wear a different shirt then."

She snaps the shirt off the floor and continues scrubbing. "Or you could be a more conscientious biter." A few flakes come out under the cold stream of water from the sink. She wishes she had something other than her nails with which to scrub at the cotton. "Back to the question, though—why this witch?"

"Because this particular witch is very, very strong, and I'm just in need of a woman with her talents."

"What about all your other witches?"

"Oh, they all have their roles to play." He snatches the shirt from her hands again, nudges her aside and starts cleaning it for her, hands moving at a pace her eyes can't follow. He seems at ease, casual in the chore, and it's another thing to remind her that Klaus had a life, once, before he was a vampire. Klaus twists the tap off and wrings the shirt over the sink. The water, pinked with blood, swirls listlessly into the drain.

Elena takes the garment from him and examines the wrinkled collar. "Good as new," she states with some satisfaction.

"So, then," he lilts as he fingers the hem of her blouse. "Does that mean I can dirty this shirt?"

This is a game she's learned to play by heart. Never ask too many questions at once, remember his answers so she can examine them later, and accede to his wishes like they are her own.

Elena pulls her hair aside and steps into the bite.

 

* * *

 

_As it turns out, he's more horny than hungry._

The bite lasts long enough for him to get a carmine mouthful, one that overflows past his lips and stains his chin red.

With each thump of her heart, the wound decorating her neck seeps a little wetter into the fabric of her blouse, over the swelling of her breast.

Have his eyes always darkened with such fevered passion while gazing at the easy river of her blood? She supposes they _must_ have, that after a millennium spent fixated upon it, a single night of wish fulfillment by the light of an enchanted bonfire will not do anything to lesson the fascination.

Klaus peels her shirt from her body, inhales the sodden scent of it before casually dropping it on the floor. He runs a hand over her neck, smears her blood down her torso, over her cheek like a primordial war-paint as he caresses her. When he kisses her, she tastes herself, metallic, a burnt offering, on his lips. He thrusts a tongue inside of her mouth and she must swallow the hot remnants or choke on them.

How many times has she fucked him, welcomed this beast inside of her, and found someone else's blood dried in his eyelashes, tasted the salt-rust of that stranger's final gasp in his kiss?

Better this way, when the blood is her own and she is the only one poised for a fall.

He stretches her out against the mattress, roams his hands down her sides and plasters them onto her hips or behind her knees. His lips sting her skin as he runs them over the puddled mess at her shoulder. When he finally does thrust inside of her, she concludes that these months with him have irrevocably fucked her up, because instead of feeling used, tormented, she feels _adored_. And in that dizzy rush of his hips sinking against hers and her blood lapping against her ear like the waves inside of a seashell, she sincerely loves him.

 

* * *

 

_These days, when she looks in the mirror, she sees Katherine staring back at her._

The similarities are deeper than the way her hair rings itself into sweaty curls during the night, has more to do with the way she holds herself and the sly twist of her lips. She can't stand them, and, she suspects, neither can Klaus.

Even though they've been without electricity for what feels like ages, he takes the time to build her a fire each morning, over which she holds a flattening iron until the metal sizzles and steam rises from the panels. Each morning, she straightens her hair, piece by tiny piece, until she can look in the mirror and instead of seeing Katherine (or worse, Tatia) staring back at her, she sees Elena, just a forlorn and jaded teenager.

Today, Elena sits on a moth-eaten green velvet ottoman near the fire while Klaus pulls on his coat and shoes. She pulls the flat iron through a piece of hair near her ear and watches the steam rise from the strands.

"Well, my dear, it looks like we've found the witch."

Elena fumbles the flat iron and burns her thumb. "What do you mean?" Her voice rises an octave, even as she fights to keep her tone level. She sticks the thumb in her mouth and hopes Klaus doesn't read too far into her actions. Perhaps she's in luck—he's busy flipping through his map book, marking places with a colored pencil.

"Oh, I mean that I'm on my way to pay her a visit." He looks up and offers her a lopsided smile. "Expect company for dinner, love."

"So you know who she is?" she asks him carefully.

He winks at her before returning his attention back to his maps, but she doesn't understand if that's supposed to be a _yes_ or a _no_ , so she presses forward.

"Klaus, do you know who the witch is? What her name is?"

This time he closes the book and takes a heavy step toward her. "Why should that matter to _you_ , Elena?"

Trapped under his glare, she's all too aware of the way the flat iron rattles in her palm, of the staccato tap of her heart against her ribs.

"It doesn't," she huffs between thick breaths.

He shrugs and opens the book back up to the page he had been perusing previously. When he doesn't say anything else on the topic, Elena assumes she's evaded him for the morning.

Even so. She berates herself for letting on too much in front of him. She can't remember a single instance of ever being so artless in her life.

Warmth trickles down her neck.

Reflexively, she touches her hand to the spot, only to find that last night's love-bite has reopened. It occurs to her, dimly, that the blood-loss could be affecting her faculties, that if she loses enough, she may be unable to gather the acumen it will take to outwit Klaus. And if he ever discovers what she knows, what will he do to her?

The smell of burning hair catches her attention, and she realizes that she has left the iron clamped to a tress of her hair for far too long. She will have to snip it off.

 

* * *

 

_The whole day, Elena waits for Klaus to come home, Bonnie in tow, to be met with her secrets point blank when he says hello._

When he _does_ come home, his hands drip blood onto the carpet, and she notices a stain, nearly black, spread over his jacket pocket.

All she wants is to rush him, to beg the information— _was it Bonnie?_ —from him. But she is a Petrova in more ways than one, and she keeps cool even as things fall apart.

"Don't you want to know what happened, sweetheart?" He suddenly looms over her, ten feet from where he stood a second ago.

"Did you find your witch?"

He reaches into his jacket and drops a dismembered hand into her lap.

A normal girl might have acted reflexively, jumped up and shouted, shaken the offending object away.

Elena sits and stares at the hand.

Klaus took it apart mid-forearm; white, cracked bone protrudes from the flesh like crumbling sticks of chalk. The blood pools in her lap, but that will stop, soon. By now the hand must be nearly drained. It's hard, because of that, to judge the exact color of the skin—Elena supposes a milky brown. The nails are clean ovals, and a silver ring still glistens on the middle finger. Everything about the hand is right, except—

This hand is not the hand of Bonnie Bennett.

She knows this because when they were eleven, rough-housing and running through her house at 3 am, Bonnie had slipped, and her right hand had sliced through the back-door's glass window. Ever since then, a slivered scar had run the length of her palm, from pinkie to wrist. _This_ hand is unblemished.

"Klaus, agreeing not to think too hard about your extracurriculars is not the same thing as enjoying a severed hand in my lap."

He laughs, and the sound falls just short of pleasant. "No interest in the owner of the hand's identity, then?"

"Was—or _is_ — she the witch you were looking for?"

"No."

"Then it doesn't really matter to me who she was." She touches her fingers to the upturned, paling palm. "Are witches even useful without their hands?"

"Not really." He picks the hand from her lap and discards it. "Alas, our witch-friend still awaits us." He seems to notice the state of their clothing. One corner of his mouth curves up into a predatory smirk. "Looks as though I've ruined another set."

She glances at the hand. "Yes, looks like you have."

 

* * *

 

_When she dreams that night, Niklaus chases her through the dusk-lit woods. It's only a game, but she loves it, loves to run and run and run and loves being caught even more._

_Snow catches at the branches, blankets the ground in thick swatches that conceal treacherous roots and fallen branches._

_"You shan't be able to escape me with that red cloak on!" he shouts, the wind whipping the words against her ears._

_She turns to look at him as she hollers her retort. "It would be an unfair race if you didn't have a beacon to guide you!"_

_No sooner does she get the satisfaction of watching his face pinch into a scowl than her foot snags a root, and she topples onto the forest floor._

_First her hands and then her head connect with a jagged rock she could have easily skipped over had she been looking at her path._

_Her hands burn and her head aches as she tries to stand up but finds she cannot. She touches the back of her head and her fingers come away wet. She wonders at her own composure._

_The frost sears her lungs as she waits for Niklaus to find her._

_"Tatia_ _?" he calls uncertainly. The sun has sunk below the trees now; it's terribly dark, and getting colder._

_"I'm over here!" She means for her voice to be loud, firm, but the words come out too high and they are lost in the whistling wind._

_The next time he calls her name, he is farther away._

_Cold seeps into her limbs._

_This will be how I die, she thinks. The snow will bury me and come the spring, the ice-floods will wash my body to the sea._

_She shuts her eyes to wait, the chase over before it had really had time to begin._

_"Tatia_ _? Are you there?"_

_This time, Niklaus calls from only a few feet away. If it were not so dark out, he would have seen her by now._

" _Niklaus, I am here!"_

_He dashes to her side and tries to pick her up, but freezes when she protests._

" _I'm bleeding," she mumbles. "I'll ruin your coat."_

_He leans in close enough so that she can see him through the dark. "No blood of your body could ever ruin anything of mine." When he picks her up to take her home, a foreboding chill rolls through her._

 

* * *

 

_There are no more witches, for a time, and everything settles._

Other matters—food, blood—occupy Klaus's attention instead.

The feedings leave her weaker than she would like, and Klaus spends substantial hours scavenging the area for red meat, for any straggling root vegetables he can find for her. He never offers her his blood as a means to keep up her health, and she's too tired to question why.

When he's asleep and very still, and the moonlight plays like a silver web against his cheek, she studies the languorous blue veins that sprawl beneath his eyes. The blood is at once his blood and _her_ blood now. She wonders, if she should ever taste him again, if he would taste as she remembers, the dark, cloying taste of vampire's blood, or if all she would taste is herself, replicated eternally in his bloodstream.

Late at night, when the exhaustion and the hunger keep her from falling past the membranous cusp of sleep, she can see him, as though in a memory—

She keeps those images to herself, because she doesn't think he will like them and they don't help her very much.

 

* * *

 

_She likes to picture her innards as a peach's pit; ripe once with something like magic, but, the pit removed, only an aching hollow that must be filled._

Elena imagines she should be more frightened by the want of food. The gnawing hunger does not bother her too much, though. She's grown entirely complacent in Klaus's care, indolent, in many ways, concerning her own fate. One way or another, Klaus will make the decision for her.

The only thing she cares to keep in her own power is the protection of the ones she loved _before_. In comparison with the fear that her tongue will slip and all of her secrets will tumble out onto the floor where Klaus will see them, the haze of her hunger and blood-loss is nothing.

Whether she is more afraid for Klaus to discover his witch's identity or her heart's true feelings she cannot say.

 

* * *

 


	14. Chapter 14

* * *

 

 

_It's always questions with him. Elena, don't you want to know? Aren't you interested in whom I found today, sweetheart?_

All too suddenly she has the terrible notion that he could simply _compel_ her to tell him what she knows.

And then the question— _Why hadn't he compelled her yet? If he suspected, why hadn't he forced an answer from her?_ Or, worse, _What if he already had?_ Whatever the answer, she kicks herself for leaving her bag with the vervain reserves in the car they abandoned along the highway.

After the realization, she keeps her eyes sharp as they travel, on the lookout for fresh vervain. But even if she found some, where to keep it? The least hint of vervain around her neck or her wrist and Klaus would be on her. The smallest trace of it in her blood and—she shudders, imagining the scene, his mouth burning as he spat a red spray onto the floor.

Eventually she hits upon the idea of keeping it behind her watch-face.

She collects tools from different houses, cuts deep scratches into the watch her parents gave her for her sixteenth birthday trying to pry the face loose.

For days she sits with the watch open, not daring too breathe too hard lest she interfere with the delicate web of cogs and gears within the watch. She memorizes the pattern of it, imagining where the vervain would fit in without destroying the aching tic-toc of the watch—

When she finally gets a hold of the coveted vervain sprig, her hands shake and her arms feel too tired to hold the hairpins she uses to tuck the plant amid the watch's machinery. She lets out a deep sigh when she places the face back on to the watch and hears the reassuring tick.

The clasp has just clicked into place around her too-thin wrist when the watch stops.

For a moment, Elena considers whether she should get rid of the watch now, be done with this plan and hope for the best—

Impossible. She must carry on, and hope Klaus never notices that her watch doesn't work.

 

* * *

 

_She doesn't hear him come in._

The first sign she has of him is his mouth against the arch of her neck, the press of his chest against her back as he spreads possessive hands around the curvature of her hips. His eyes find hers in the mirror—for a second, they glow like a night predator's in the candlelight.

The moon, she realizes, is full tonight.

He has never stayed with her these nights, instead choosing to let the moon sway him into the wolf's madness. What is different about tonight, she cannot say.

She turns in his arms and from there it is only the feel of his lips mashing against hers, only the rough slide of his hand as he slips past the hem of her shirt.

They make it to the bed— He falls back when she pushes at him (as though her strength could move him), but he grabs at her almost immediately, frenzied until she settles astride him.

Elena can feel him through the denim of his jeans. She grinds down into him, reveling in the impatient rise of his hips against hers with each slow circle of her hips.

What strikes her as unusual is his silence—no words, no nasty pictures painted by the whisper of his mouth against her skin—just the low rumble emanating from his chest, the lengthening of his canines and incisors, the yellowing of his eyes.

She must have frozen atop him, staring down at the monster's visage like a damselfly caught in the web, because he snarls, flips her over forcefully enough for her head to crack against the mattress, and tears her clothes from her body. He plunges into her in one swift movement. Everything about the tryst sings speed, desperation, like he can't bury himself deep enough within her.

Elena feels like she will break from the smack of his bones, like she will rip in half from this animal driving himself within her. She digs her fingers into his back and holds on, opens herself to him as much as she can, because, even now, if this is what it takes for him, if this is what he needs, then she wants him to have it.

 

* * *

 

_The moon passes, sinks below the horizon to be replaced by the weak and watery sun._

They remain in bed, though, and Klaus seems only too happy to spend his time exploring each particular of her body instead of rising to face another fruitless day.

Midmorning, Elena lies curled against his side. She's almost asleep, hopeless though that endeavor should have been from the deep-muscle bruises pooling together under her skin.

Klaus is beside her, an arm thrown casually around her shoulders as he stares at the ceiling. He's redolent, a lazy predator after his hunger has been met, she thinks. This is more his usual self – the scheming, frightening sociopath, rather than the unbidden wolf and his consuming appetite.

She's just about asleep, taking in big, calm breaths, when Klaus asks her, in lieu of nothing but the machinations of his mind, "I suppose your little friend is just coming out of the transition now."

"What?"

"Your friend the werewolf. He's probably waking up in some forest clearing as we speak—would the girl be there as well?"

"You mean Tyler and Caroline," she tells him, voice flat.

He makes a noncommittal noise deep in his throat.

"What's your point?"

"Oh, nothing, sweetheart, just having a bit of a think about where we are today. You and me, and then the rest of my family, your friends—excepting the vampire and the wolf—either dead or out there in the big lonely word." He runs a hand down her arm. "It all makes me wonder—who else may have survived? Certainly neither of the Salvatores." He smiles as he says it, though she knows it's all for the thought of Damon's death, and not for Stefan's. "But I seem to recall you had a brother—and a witchy friend as well, if memory serves—how did _they_ withstand your little apocalypse?" He's half a heartbeat from asking the wrong question.

Elena turns in his arms until she is straddling his body. "How do you think?" She doesn't bother waiting for his response, doesn't want him to continue this line of questioning—it's all too dangerous. "It doesn't really matter anyway," she continues as she slinks down to the sweet, tight juncture of his hips. He's half-hard already—he always is, at least as far as she can tell. "I have you now," she declares, allowing his possession of her to settle inside of him before taking him into her mouth and making him forget that she ever had anyone else at all.

 

* * *

 

_Klaus strolls into the room one day, and from the scowl on his face, Elena already knows the outcome of the day._

"Elena," he calls, voice tight with agitation, and, like always, the simmering rage.

"I'm here." She rises slowly from the shadows. Does she look like Katherine emerging from the tomb? All sharp bones and visceral hunger? Or did Katherine look like _her_ , wearing her hair straight for a party _she_ was invited to?

Klaus's lips press into a hard, white line at the sight of her. He prowls toward her, casting his eyes up the length of her legs until settling his gaze on her face.

She's so tired. Standing only makes her want to wilt back into her chair and try to sleep. And yet with Klaus, there is always this performance, and she must make her way through the ambient flames each and every day.

He touches a hand to her face, and she wonders where this particular interview will go. He traces the over-exposed arch of her cheekbone as he tells her, "I just want to right things, just a bit. Make things easier for us—" The hand skirts down her neck, to settle over the dull thump of her heart. "If I could only find the witch—" His hand clenches around her rib cage, and all the air knocks from her lungs.

Klaus will let up in just a second, he'll let go, he'll let her breathe—

The pressure just keeps building. Her lungs pump like a torn organ bellow. No air comes.

Black spots dance across her vision, and she hears more than sees Klaus as he tips her chin so she must look directly in his eyes.

"Elena—" The tone is familiar, because she's heard it too many times, been the victim of failed compulsion too often. "Are you hiding anything from me?"

Her watch's silence fills the space her breathing should have filled.

She wants to speak, but her mouth gapes open like a fish slowly suffocating on the beach's sands.

Klaus seems to get his answer and finally allows her to breathe.

She wants to pant, to gasp greedily at the air until she feels steady again, but then that would tip him off. Elena literally takes in only enough air to answer, her voice steady and dead of free-will, "No."

The answer seems to satisfy.

She presumes he must have stepped out of the compulsion, because the next moment he is placing his hands back on her abdomen, telling her to breathe, to exhale, to breathe again, as though this weren't his doing.

And yet… she has overcome.

 

* * *

 

_She sleeps most days, and the days blend into nights in a rhythm she cannot break._

"Elena—Elena, wake up."

The hand shaking her awake pulls away, and she is tempted to curl back into a ball and keep sleeping. She thinks she could sleep forever.

"Come on now, sweetheart, don't make me tell you twice."

"What's going on?"

"We're off to see a witch. Hurry now, I don't want her to run before we get there."

Typical.

Ten minutes later she follows Klaus out the door, the previous night's curls still in her hair. He pulls her close, so he can run with her. No matter how many times he does this, she cannot help but look back upon the first time they did this—the silent woods, the wind whipping at their faces as he brought her to a very different witch.

She wishes she could still keep track of where they were—somewhere on the North American continent, she _thinks_ , but she's stopped paying attention and without the familiar landmarks, has been unable to figure it out since. Klaus, she's sure, must know, must keep a careful record in his map book—yet the answer seems too unimportant next to her hunger, next to the all-consuming necessity of yielding Klaus her body and her blood.

They stop at a house on the edge of a cliff. Inside, candlelight flickers against the windows, even though it is only midday.

Klaus takes her by the hand and leads her forward—the tableau of a boyfriend introducing the girl to his family.

Elena wishes she had never met his family.

The witch opens the door before he can knock. She's tall, fierce eyed, and, from the twist of her lip when she spots Elena, a little jealous. Beneath all of that, though, is the same wasting hunger, the one Elena knows so well, that is eating her alive. Her voice is strong and firm, though, as she calls out to them. "I've been expecting you, Klaus. Surprised it took you so long to show up."

"I had a bit of difficulty tracking you down, if you must know—" His eyes slide to where Elena stands at his side. "And I've been a bit preoccupied."

The witch juts her chin in her direction. "I thought the doppelganger was dead."

Klaus shrugs. "Most people make that mistake." He shifts next to her, and Elena cannot tell anymore whether she is more frightened for the witch who has looked upon her too closely, or for herself, the focus of his jealous eye. "Can we come in, Sylvie?"

"Could I say no even if I wanted to?" She lingers a beat. "Well, come on in."

Half of his lips rise into a smirk as he strolls through the door. He pauses when he senses Elena isn't following him. "Don't worry, my dear," he tells her, amusement thick in his voice, as he gestures for her to take her place by his side. "Sylvie doesn't usually bite." He winks at the darkly beautiful witch and they share a slow and easy sort of smile.

Elena wanders in after him. She doesn't like the way Sylvie looks at her, likes the witch's familiar intimacy with Klaus even less, and likes the frank desire in Klaus's interactions with the witch least of all.

"You're here to ask about a spell, is that right, Klaus?" Sylvie asks as she waltzes into the back of her house. Beaded oil lamps cast flickering shadows along the walls, and smoky incense hangs heavy in the air. Elena chooses a seat at the far end of the kitchen table to watch them.

"After a fashion," he agrees as he fingers a lapis lazuli stone sitting on a shelf. "I'd like to locate a witch."

Sylvie pauses mid-motion as she settles into a kitchen chair near Klaus, the moment so brief Elena would have missed it if her attention weren't focused on the other woman already. "Do you have anything belonging to her? A personal item, an object that she spelled?"

Klaus's eyes slide over to where Elena sits. She can feel his gaze on her as he replies, "I'm looking for more than just the witch's location. Really, that's just a by-point."

The witch frowns. "So where do I figure in to all of this? These days, with the natural balance skewed beyond recognition, even finding her _with_ a personal item would be tricky…"

They wait for him to elaborate, but, typically, he lets them both dangle while he peruses Sylvie's shelves.

Finally, he leaves the shelf to pace the circumference of the room. "I wanted to talk to you about my plans, Sylvie-love. There was a witch in my sister's army—a witch that was stronger than all of the rest—stronger by a magnitude. I have a theory—and stop me if I'm wrong—I have a theory that an experienced, clever witch like you might be able to channel such a one."

Sylvie's eyes catch the candle light and a slow smile spreads over her face. "Ambitious," she murmurs as she steps over to Klaus and puts a hand on his arm. "But why the need for that much power?"

"The world burned apart while I was looking elsewhere. I want things the way they were."

"For a spell that big, channeling the witch will kill her."

"You could do it though?"

Sylvie pauses and Elena holds her breath. "I could," she says at length. "But to tap into another witch, I'd need her bodily presence. And for that, we'd need to locate her, which we can't do without any leads. Unless you have anything to offer me— something she spelled, with a strong bit of magic attached to it—" She holds up her hands and rubs her fingers together. "Nada."

He smiles almost sweetly. "Conveniently, I have the solution here." Klaus turns away from the shelves and meanders toward Elena. He brushes the hair from her neck and spreads his fingers against the ridged edges of his bite-scar. "You remarked earlier that you believed the doppelganger to be dead. You were, of course, correct. She _was_ dead, _I_ drained her, and the witch I am looking for cast the spell to resurrect her."

Elena feels the blood drain from her face as she stares up at him, caught in his inhuman stare.

"What do you say, Elena?" He caresses the syllables of her name as he strokes a hand up the length of her neck. "Shall we see what we shall see?"

 

* * *


	15. Chapter 15

* * *

 

" _Klaus?"_

Blood throbs in her ears. The punch of her heart against her ribs nearly drowns out all else as Klaus pins her by the arms in her chair.

His lips are moving, moving, and she wants to die rather than surrender herself for his deadly purpose—except there is nowhere to go, not now, and the best she can do is ask—"How did you know?" The words come out weak, a mute gasp. She nearly chokes on them.

"The vervain on your wrist. I could smell it on you, on your skin, in our bed. I asked myself, why wear it now—why not before?—if you weren't hiding something?" His voice isn't cold. He speaks to her almost tenderly, and this is that much worse because of it.

"I couldn't let you hurt Bonnie," she whispers.

He doesn't respond to her, instead beckons Sylvie over.

Sylvie clasps her cold, hard fingers around Elena's jaw and examines her like she would an animal. "This is going to hurt, girl."

Elena meets the witch's gaze and raises her chin. She recalls the slick bite of the dagger she drew upon herself in the doorway of her parents' lake house; she recalls the viscous snap of Klaus's fangs as he ripped her throat out beneath a starry night sky; the rope that broke her neck, the last thing she felt the sensation of swinging like a marionette suspended from the ceiling; the lap of the flames against her face as she was consumed by a river of her own blood. Compared to these, Elena does not think this will hurt a bit.

 

* * *

 

_Elena bears the pain like she was born to it._

In a way, Klaus supposes, she was.

Words tremble from Sylvie's lips as she draws a dagger against Elena's temples, the pulse-points at her neck, the sinews at the crux of her darling arms. Elena goes limp beneath the witch's hands, her limbs useless. The blood shoots like heavy streamers onto the table as Sylvie steeps her fingers up to the knuckles in the fresh-torn wounds.

Klaus grabs Sylvie's wrists. "Mind you don't let the girl bleed out." He squeezes until he feels her ulna rub against the radius.

"Do you want your witch, Klaus?" She throws her chin in Elena's direction. "She loses more blood by the moment, and when _it_ goes, so does your chance to ever find that witch."

He releases her wrists and drops his eyes to Elena's blanched, clenched face. "Don't screw this up, Sylvie."

The witch has already turned her back and returned to her spell, already let him fade out and away from her.

Elena's eyes—those dark eyes he knows, now, that he will never escape—never leave him as Sylvie peels back her skin like a peach to let blood memory do its trick so she can pluck out the pit, that little inkling of a link between Elena and her witch friend his girl hadn't even known that she possessed.

The smell of her blood itches at the back of his throat, burns at his nose and sits clawing against the hollow of his stomach.

He wants to dip a finger into the crimson puddle rippling beneath Elena's hair and rub the residue against his tongue, wants to lay his lips against her savaged arm and suck the juices from the exposed red muscle, wants to—

"Found her." Sylvie pulls her fingers from Elena's breaking body and holds her dripping hands over a ceramic bowl sitting on the kitchen table.

Klaus bites into his wrist and pulls Elena into his grasp before Sylvie can move entirely out of the way. "Well?" he asks as he cradles Elena to his chest, patiently massaging the blood down her throat.

Elena coughs much of it back up, but she regains a measure of color he hasn't seen on her in months, and the pressure of her hand against his bicep lets him know she's regained use of her arms.

He unclasps the watch from her wrist and pockets it as her eyes open. "Sleep, now, Elena." He forces the thought on her before she can protest.

Sylvie waits for his attention before informing him, "Your witch is in Europe—or what's left of it."

"You're certain?"

"One hundred percent."

"Could you be more specific?"

"Hard to be specific without a working map, Klaus. But at least this gives you somewhere to start."

"If you're lying—"

"Why would I? I want things fixed too." Sylvie gives Elena a frown. "You'll do whatever it takes to fix this?" She motions at the entire room, a gesture that takes in everything.

He nods, slowly.

"Even if it requires the doppelganger's blood?"

"Why would you need her blood?"

Sylvie shrugs and swirls a lazy finger in the ceramic bowl she's filled to the brim with Elena's blood. "The girl's already an inversion of nature—a duplicate occurring outside of natural time and place. Her blood—it's a perfect catalyst. An inversion of nature, to invert the already inverted." Sylvie lifts her fingers from the bowl and rubs the reddened forefinger against the pad of her thumb. "I can't do the spell without her blood, Klaus."

Klaus considers her. "How much will you need?"

"All of it. We're talking full-blown sacrifice."

Of course. As per usual. He almost laughs.

And yet, if that is the price… "When the time comes, I'll bring her to you."

Sylvie bows her head and moves to put the bowl she carries away.

"Oh, and Sylvie? Since I've agreed to be so _generous_ in the future, I'd like my doppelganger's blood back today."

Sylvie pulls the bowl against her body. "It's a rare commodity, Klaus. Potent. I could use it to—"

"I don't particularly care, Sylvie. Give it to me while I'm still asking." He holds out his hand and waits for Sylvie to hand him the bowl. "There's a good girl," he tells her when she finally places it in his hands. He tips the bowl back and swallows it all, before grabbing at Sylvie's hand and licking the blood spattering clean from her skin.

When he finishes, Sylvie pushes him away. "You're far too possessive of that girl, Klaus. It's going to get you in trouble."

He twists his lips. "She's a Petrova. Trouble's all she's got."

Sylvie frowns at him.

He kisses her hand before swinging Elena up into his arms. "I'll be in touch, Sylvie."

"Remember," she calls out behind him as he steps through the front door, "We can't do this without the girl's blood."

Oh, he'll remember.

 

* * *

 

_Elena wakes up at the house they had slept in the night before, feeling more clear-headed than she has in months and months._

She can barely make out Klaus's shadow as he moves about the room, jamming loose papers into his bag and ransacking through the drawers.

"How long had you known?" Her voice creaks, like she hasn't used it in a long time, and she wonders how long she was unconscious.

Klaus turns to study her, before settling onto the edge of the bed next to her. "A few weeks now."

"You didn't say anything."

For the first time, Elena cannot determine any emotion flickering behind his eyes, or ticking in the clench of his jaw. The notion that he feels _nothing_ for this, the dark revelation of her betrayal, settles upon her.

It's too much. All of the stress, the choking anxiety she has felt, the _guilt_ she has endured for keeping this from him—all meaningless in the face of his casual composure.

At some level, she knows nothing will change between then, just because she overestimated how much her deception would matter to them. And yet, she wishes that something _would_ change, if only to show…

Against the weight of her thoughts, she forgets she's waiting for his response until he tells her, "I wanted to see if you would tell me yourself."

"I guess I failed your test then."

The smile he gives her as he brushes the back of his knuckles against her cheek is more regretful than anything else.

It gives her a sick modicum of hope that something about this _matters_ to him.

He lingers in that moment, in the slow slide of his hand against her skin before he answers her. "Spectacularly." Something about the way he says it alerts her that this is not the full story. There's something more behind his words, a thought or a memory just out of reach— "It's in your nature, though, to betray the ones closest to you."

The words complete the whatever it is Elena had been trying to grasp. She looks away. "So that's it, then? No anger? No revenge for lying to you?"

He laughs. "Oh, I planned for it—Thought of all the nasty things I could do to your friends while I had you watch—even tracked down Caroline and Tyler's whereabouts—but where would be the point? It won't change anything, it won't make things _better—_ besides which, I suspect what will happen to your witch friend will be punishment enough."

"Klaus—"

"Elena. You'll never be anything other than what you are. I realized a long time ago that there is no sense in being angry with you for acting upon your nature."

"And what am I?" she asks miserably.

"You're _Elena._ You're—"

"Another Petrova woman who's betrayed you."

He shrugs. "I knew what you were when I chose to bring you with me. You know," he tells her as he strokes her hair, "that day I found you, after the battle, I fancied you looked just like Tatia. It's why I saved you."

"Great. Thanks for the anecdote."

Klaus shifts his weight like he's going to get up.

"But Klaus?" She lets his name settle in the air between them. "Was it wrong? To keep this from you—wasn't it the right thing to do? It's not like you could be hurt, or die, from not finding Bonnie. You just wouldn't get what you want. So did it even matter?"

He leans forward, so his nose almost touches her cheek, and traces a hand over the mass of scars against her neck. "You're just as loyal to me as you've ever been, Elena. Which I don't think is all that much, to be clear." His finger taps against the center of the scar tissue, along the raised edge of the first vampire bite to grace her neck. "So I suppose no, it doesn't matter all that much." His hand clenches against her neck when she closes her eyes. "But Elena, my dear, sweet girl, listen carefully. I refuse to allow you to die because of whatever misguided loyalty you feel toward a long extinguished friendship."

It's the closest to an admission of feelings that he's ever given her. Underneath all of that webs and double-meanings, he's just yielded her the last piece that she needed.

"Okay, then. No more secrets. I'll help."

Klaus scrutinizes her face like he's never seen her before, and she doesn't blame him. He _should_ be skeptical. _She's_ skeptical herself. But for him, for whatever twisted romance that they're acting out, she'll do her best.

 

* * *

 

 _For the first time, maybe_ ever _, there are no secrets between them that night when Elena wraps her longs legs around his waist and urges him inside of her._

Klaus moves so slowly inside of her that she forgets at times that he is there at all, save for the weight of him against her ribcage, the heat of his breath against her earlobe.

Something about this night is sweeter than the rest—something about the way he kisses the sweat from her neck or the way he whispers her name against the swell of her breast as he moves them steadily toward climax.

Afterwards, when Elena feels tired and satiated and Klaus leans into her neck to feed from her, she closes her eyes and lets her thoughts float freely. What does it mean, she wonders, this new understanding she's come to with Klaus?

When he finishes, she expects him to settle beside her for sleep, expects to spend the night fighting the faintness and the nausea that always come about after he drinks from her—so she's surprised when he bites his wrist and silently offers it to her.

Elena stares at the wound a few inches from her face without making any move to accept it.

"Come on, now, Elena, don't be stubborn. Drink up."

"Why?" She feels a moment of guilt, because she cannot help but fall into old patterns of distrust.

"I can't keep feeding from you if you don't keep your strength up."

"If you're doing this just to heal me, then why haven't you offered me your blood before?" she asks as she watches the gash stitch itself closed.

Klaus rolls his eyes and smiles just the barest amount. "Always so suspicious." He scratches at the stubble growing in at his chin. "Well, since we're playing at honesty now—I thought I'd get an answer out of you regarding the whereabouts of your witch friend much faster if I kept you weak. I didn't think you'd hold out this long."

"You were weakening me on purpose?"

He shrugs. "Don't take it personally, love. I was just doing what I had to."

Elena studies him for a moment before responding. "I don't. Take it personally, that is." She glances at his wrist.

Klaus gives her a knowing look before his eyes change color and his canines elongate. He tears a new wound into his flesh and this time, when he holds his bleeding wrist out for Elena to take, she does not hesitate to put her mouth to it.

 

* * *

 

_When Elena wakes next, the sun has risen, and her bag sits neatly packed at the foot of the bed._

Carefully, she steps over to the foot of the bed and unzips her backpack.

Inside, Stefan's journal sits nestled against her own.

Elena strokes her finger along the edges, imagines their words—their hearts—vibrating against each other. The contact of these journals, she realizes, is the closest intimacy with the boy she loved and lost that she will ever find again. She wishes Damon had kept a journal, so that she could place herself between the Salvatores again.

"Are you ready to move on, my dear?"

Elena looks up to see Klaus leaning against the doorjam, arms crossed languidly in front of him.

"Move on where?" she asks as she zips the backpack and tugs it onto her shoulders.

"Across the pond."

She freezes in the middle of adjusting the straps. "You mean Europe?"

"Afraid so."

"How are we even going to get over there? It's not like there're any planes or anything."

"I suppose we'll have to go the way my parents went a thousand years ago."

"By boat? That's absurd. Compasses don't work anymore, and the stars are all different. We'll get lost in no time."

He pulls his mapbook out of his bag. "Elena, I've been studying the constellations—such as they are now—ever since you started this mess by awakening my family. I'm _confident_ I can navigate us."

She crosses her arms under her breasts and huffs a little. Elena hates that he's thought this through, because it means that it'll probably happen. "Okay, fine. What about the boat?" she asks, looking for the detail for which he doesn't have a ready answer. "Even if we find one, would it be able to withstand the open seas? And what about food?"

Klaus takes the bag from her shoulder and tosses it on the bed, before resting his palms against her tense shoulders and squeezing. "Elena, _calm down_. We're not leaving immediately—I'll take the time to gather a crew together and find some supplies as well. And as for a boat, it won't be that complicated. You know, the Vikings crossed the open ocean in longboats."

Elena frowns at him. "Wait, go back. By 'gather a crew,' you mean compel a crew. You can barely feed me. How are you going to feed them?"

"Come, now, love, who says it's not going to be the other way around?"

She feels caught in this trap he's spun for her. On the one hand, she's been looking the other way for about a year now as he killed whenever it suited him. And yet, she cannot simply sit back while he murders everyone around her—

"You know, if you don't like it, I'll just compel you so you don't remember." He says this with a smile, almost teasingly. As if he were a normal guy with his girl.

Elena has long since accepted that she will never have _normal_. She's learning to be okay with that.

She exhales slowly. That doesn't mean she won't try to dissuade him from what he wants to do.

"Fine. Why are we risking this trip again? Is Bonnie…?"

"Ah, there's my smart girl. Bonnie _is_ over there—"

"How?"

"Magic, probably. What with the hundred dead witches she's channeling, I'd imagine it wouldn't be too difficult to hop so far afield."

With that sort of reasoning, Elena wonders how he thinks he'll ever catch her.

"And of course," he adds, "there's not much left to live on here."

"How do you know Europe is any better?"

"I don't. But it's worth a try, isn't it?"

Elena nods.

"Alright then." He slings her bag over his shoulder and snags his from its place on the floor. "Off we go."

 

* * *


	16. Chapter 16

* * *

 

At night, Elena can hear the ocean lapping against the mountainside their Basque villa occupies. The bells toll on, every hour, and it's the first time since she dismantled her watch all those years ago that she's had a good idea of time at all. It seems, sometimes, that she's been with Klaus forever, though she knows it can't have been longer than a few years.

Klaus had been right, of course. Europe _is_ better.

Since all of the battling happened in the Americas, the geography of the Eastern Hemisphere is more in tact—though that isn't saying a lot. Although the earth has not been split and rejoined by earthquakes and fire, as it had back West, the off-kilter moon still pulls the oceans too far inland and the watery sun still provides little heat and less light. The people here die by inches instead of by feet.

Klaus does his best to keep a low profile as he tracks Bonnie; again, as in the West, Klaus finds a witch he knows and they perform a very similar locator spell to the one that Sylvie performed in order to confirm that Bonnie is still _near_ , though where exactly, Elena cannot help but be relieved they cannot precisely say.

They move listlessly through Europe, sometimes staying here, sometimes there, following the population bulges, until they arrive in Spain—or what's left of it—and the population abruptly drops below Klaus's survival needs.

Once he regularly begins feeding on her again, Klaus feels ready to move on. This is always the problem—he needs to comb the lands looking for Bonnie, but once they hit a low population, he becomes reluctant to stay and rely solely on Elena's blood to sustain him.

He never says it outright, but she knows he cannot be certain of how long she can survive on his blood alone before she succumbs to her hunger. And what good would two hungry vampires do for either of them?

 

* * *

 

_When they crossed the Atlantic, Elena dreamt of another voyage, and the memories were so clear she felt she could see straight down a hundred feet to the bottom of them._

_She dreams of warm furs bundling her up so well that they obscure the growing swell of her belly. She dreams that when she rests, she can hear the water slapping against the side of the boat; she gets wet, sometimes, when the waves chop the surface of the water and the great long boat must cut between them or over them or through them, or when it rains and her only shelter are the oil-slicked tarps her father had given her before he sent her West._

_The disgrace in her belly kicks her hard, and she wonders how it can still live when she has nurtured it with nothing but fish and stale mead. Kick the child does, though, fretfully, forcefully, as if to say that it is here and will never leave her._

_She yearns for anyone who will not leave her._

_Another sharp kick, this one directly into the palm of her hand as it caresses the curve of her stomach, and she vows to never feel shame for this life growing within her again. Never again will she run from her heart. Instead, she will face the consequence of its content headlong._

_Most of all, she vows that never again will a man curse the luck that brought him Tatia Petrova's love._

_Elena always awoke from these dreams covered in a fleece blanket, under the tarping that Klaus had strung up to keep the rain off of her and to the laborious grunts of the men oaring the boat, guiding the sails, the men that would never see dry land again._

_Each time she wakes, she considers Klaus as she turns the dream over in her mind, and wonders if Tatia had failed to keep her vow after all._

 

* * *

 

Once they leave Spain, they cut a swath through France, and when Klaus begins to tire of waif thin French girls whose blood, he insists, still tastes like cigarettes years after the last carton was smoked, they hop the Channel into England.

They pass through crumbling cities and dying wilderness.

London sits low and heavy against the Thymes, the modern high-rises reduced to mountains of rubble while the Tower of London leans drunkenly toward the ground.

"London Bridge is fallen down," Elena murmurs as Klaus pulls her through the city, whispering memories from earlier times into her ear as they pass St. Paul's and meander into Smithfield.

"You sound like you've spent a lot of time here," Elena remarks.

He nods absently. "I've always fancied it."

"Is that why you affect that accent? Because I _know_ it's fake."

"Why is that?"

She frowns. "Well, Elijah never talked like that—and he said your family was from Eastern Europe. So you must be copying the accent to sound English on purpose."

"Am I, now?" He offers her a smirk. "Do copies bother you?"

"Yes."

"Is my accent anymore a copy than yourself?"

Elena doesn't have the answer. Maybe, even as recently as the day of the sacrifice, she would have vehemently told him yes, because _she_ was only a copy on the surface. Now, though, she can't quite be sure.

Klaus hooks a finger under her jaw so she'll look at him. "Come now, don't pout, Elena. It suits you too well."

 

* * *

 

"The English countryside was beautiful. More colors than anywhere I'd ever seen before—flowers, everywhere, horses, beautiful women—" Klaus talks like this for hours as they walk on seemingly forever, and Elena cannot help herself—she listens, _enraptured_ by the stories he spins for her.

Even so, she has the unsettling feeling that, no matter how exquisite Klaus's ability to tell a tale may be, his descriptions cannot account for the vivid images that waver in her mind's eye.

A castle arises out of the murk.

Curiosity nips at her, but only for a moment. Something about the gothic structure disquiets her, and all she wants to do is press herself closer to Klaus and move on.

To her dismay, Klaus turns toward it. "Well, I'll be damned," he murmurs as he pauses before it. "Still standing after all these years."

"Do you know this place?" Elena asks, tugging at his arm.

He turns toward her, his lips raised in amusement. "Of course I do. It used to be mine."

 

* * *

 

The castle hasn't been lived in in a very, very, _very_ long time. The furniture is older than she's ever seen outside of a museum. She fears sitting in the chairs lest they break under her weight, avoids placing her bag down on the table lest the legs snap from under it and damage her possessions.

Klaus mumbles something about finding a suitable place to bed down for the evening, so Elena wanders through the castle alone. She chooses rooms at random, sometimes leaving after just poking her head in, sometimes slipping through a crack in the doorway and opening drawers and trunks as she pleases.

In one room, she finds a collection of preserved animals— lions posed upright, backs arched and mouths agape, with their pelts sewn back on, a stuffed dodo, and beetles pinned by the legs to a piece of worm-eaten wood.

In another room, she finds a trunk filled with letters, written in scripts she cannot read. When she accidentally lays her thumb on the top line of writing on one of the letters, the ink wears off from the oil on her skin. In the same room, she opens an armoire and finds a vast array of beautiful dresses, tattered beyond repair now, but obviously once exquisite. When she lifts a ruby red dress's sleeve to examine the finely embroidered cuff, the threads gleam golden for a moment before the fabric crumbles in her hand. She tries another dress, and it too disintegrates at her touch.

She is just about to leave when she notices, in the darkened back of the room, the silhouette of a painting hanging upon the far wall.

The spirit of adventure upon her, Elena moves to the western facing window and shoves back the curtains so she can get a clearer look at the painting's subject.

Her breath catches in her lungs when she sees the face gazing back at her, and for a moment her heart freezes in her chest.

There, watching her from the portrait on the wall, is herself. Only, it's not herself at all.

Katerina Petrova stares back at her, a playful smile stretching her lips and lighting her eyes, all too clearly human and all to clearly a very happy girl.

The sickening realization that this castle is the scene of Katerina Petrova's last morbid days of human life strikes her hard.

She looks around, and suddenly she knows.

This room had belonged to Katerina. She had slept in that bed, had worn those dresses and received those letters.

Elena cannot bear to be in that room another moment. She runs back toward the front of the house, away, away from it all.

"Don't be skittish, Elena," Klaus chides her as she stumbles into him.

She looks up at him, and can only see him as he must've looked to Katerina in her final days. And yet, she relaxes as how _she_ sees him, how she knows him, comes back to her. "How long has this house been deserted?" she asks once the startling experience of seeing Katerina's old room fades.

"A few centuries. I didn't really fancy staying here after…" He trails off and offers no further explanation.

It doesn't really surprise her. He's like that, and she's learned to live with it over the years.

_She doesn't mention that she's starting to fill in the pieces without his help._

Upstairs, the ceiling creaks.

They both pause, Elena frozen where she stands, Klaus with a silencing finger over his lips and his ear cocked toward the ceiling.

" _Vampire?_ " she mouths when his eyes slide over to where she stands.

Another creak, this time further away—as though whatever is up there has moved.

"Definitely rats in the walls," he tells her softly, so softly she almost cannot hear. "But those," he determines, as he points up right as something upstairs shifts its weight, "are definitely foot steps."

 _Human or vampire?_ she wonders. _Which is worse?_

Klaus looks at her, and Elena can tell he is considering his options. To take her with her, possibly endangering her to whatever is upstairs, or leave her alone, unprotected downstairs?

In the end, he takes her hand and leads her to the bottom of the stairwell, before tucking her behind a blind corner. He places a gun in her hand. "You hear anything at all—anything—and you shoot, you hear me?"

"What if it's a human?"

Klaus pats her hand as she checks the wooden rounds and takes the safety off of the gun. "Humans are dangerous too, sweetheart. I'm sure you know about that first hand."

He disappears before she can respond, but, to be honest, she wouldn't have been able to contradict him.

The smell of the house, though the heavy air feels stale and musty, tickles at the edges of her memories.

Elena feels as though she's been here before, though she knows, obviously, that this can't be the case. And yet—she thinks that if she turns around the corner, in the opposite direction from which she came, she'll find herself in a library filled to the ceiling with books and lit by a great stone fireplace, and, if she chooses a different door, she'll find a servant's stairwell that winds upwards toward the eastern wing of the castle.

Once these thoughts cross her mind, Elena cannot fight the urge to follow them down the hallway and see if she is right. The fact that she hears nothing, sees no one, only spurs her toward investigating the troubling notion that she _knows_ this place.

She turns around the corner in the opposite direction from which she came. The passageway on this side of the castle is windowless, the lighting increasingly dim as she wanders away from the front part of the castle. Eventually, she finds a large wooden door with heavy iron handles on it. Elena pushes lightly on them, and when that does nothing, heaves against the wood until the hinges pop from their rust and cringe open.

In the late afternoon, this room is not as well lit as those on the other side of the house. Moth eaten tapestries cover the windows, allowing only a smattering of sunbeams to spill into the room. And yet, Elena recognizes the wide oak shelves, the tall, leather bound volumes sitting against the wall and the limestone fireplace.

Swallowing hard, Elena steps back into the hallway and closes the door behind her. A library, she reasons, would be just what she imagined to be in an old castle like this— _especially_ knowing it belonged to Klaus. Perhaps it is a coincidence—even if she knows it is not.

Elena turns toward the other door and opens it. Inside, the room is pitch black. She cannot see anything through the darkness, but hopes to be able to make something out if she gives her eyes time to adjust to the deep black around her. Tentatively, she takes a few steps into the room, toward where she believes the stairwell to begin.

Something knocks into her _hard_.

It all happens very fast after that.

Large hands grab her around the neck, forcing the air from her lungs, and they're strong, but not inhumanly strong—and so it shocks her, how little remorse she feels, when she jams the gun against her assailant's head and snaps the trigger.

A crack of light blinds her for a moment, and then all is black again, silent, save for the sound of her breathing.

Hot liquid pours down the back of her neck. She reaches behind her and realizes it must be blood—and probably something else.

"Elena!" Klaus calls to her, from the other side of the house. "Elena!" Closer, now, at the top of the stairwell. A millisecond later, and he has her by the shoulders. "Elena, look at me." He grabs her by the chin and forces her face in his direction when she ignores him. "Are you injured? Any harm?"

She purses her lips. "None."

She cannot see him in the dark, but she knows he can see her—can see the look on her face, the expression in her eyes, whatever they may be. He doesn't say anything for a moment, but seems to reconsider his silence when he asks her, very quietly, "Have you ever killed anyone before?"

"Yes."

"I mean directly, by your own hands." After a beat, he adds, "Who couldn't reanimate like Elijah."

She doesn't respond, and she knows he takes that as his answer.

"Ah, there's my girl," he whispers as he tucks her under his chin. "It's not so bad as all that, sweetheart. You'll get over it in no time."

Elena wants to tell him— _You don't understand. I felt nothing_. But the words never leave her lips, and she lets him lead her up to bed.

 

* * *

 

The room he leads her to turns out to be his old bedroom. He's covered the old mattress with fresh bedding that she doesn't recognize, but all of the other details of this room are as she _knows_ them to be.

She's sure of this, even though he doesn't offhandedly mention it until he has cleaned the stranger's guts off of her and put her to bed.

Elena tries to sleep, but cannot put her mind to rest. She turns toward Klaus.

His eyes are closed, but he's not asleep, only quiet.

"Who was that man earlier today?"

"Squatter." He exhales the word against the pillow, eyes still closed.

"Why was he here?"

"Shelter, I suppose. Maybe to loot the place."

She fingers the bedding and supposes it had belonged to the man she killed.

"They hadn't been here long," Klaus adds, almost as an afterthought.

"There were more than one?"

He opens his eyes now. "Yes. I killed the rest."

"Were they a threat? I mean—" she pauses, collecting her words. "Were they violent, without provocation?"

"You mean, did you kill a man in cold blood today?"

She nods.

He thinks for a moment on her question.

She feels better about this, because she knows he will give her an honest answer.

"Perhaps. The man downstairs certainly tried to strangle you."

"Yeah, but that was after _you'd_ attacked _them_."

"Does that matter? You were still fighting for your life."

She sighs and closes her eyes. "No, I suppose it doesn't matter." She wraps herself in his embrace. "Nothing else seems to matter at all anymore."

 

* * *

 

 _The wind whips her hair, and she cuts her face on sharp fronds as she_ runs like hell _through the night._

 _Fatigue sets in, but she doesn't give into it,_ refuses _to have her blood spilled over some silly little rock, so she ignores the fire coursing through her blood and the acidic ache in her muscles and pushes herself harder. A branch catches her voluminous skirts, and she trips, tumbles down a hill and lands against the bole of a tree. She cowers against it as the hunting party approaches._

 _A man's voice—_ Elijah's _—calls for her in the near distance. "Katerina! I know you're here." Softer, he mutters, "I can smell your blood." The declaration sends a bolt of terror through her as she presses her body as close to the tree as possible._

" _It's pointless to run. Klaus will find you wherever you are."_

Elena awakens with a gasp, her throat burning. She sits up in bed and wraps her arms around her knees.

"What's the matter?" Klaus asks as he sits up, too.

She doesn't look at him as she tells him, "Bad dreams."

"Oh, is that all?"

She glances toward him, then, and in the dappled moonlight, she can see the whites of his canines as he smiles.

"Don't you know, pretty girl, that there's nothing to fear when the deadliest thing of all is in your bed?"

She swallows convulsively. "That's what worries me. I dreamt I was Katherine."

If what she says catches his interest too closely, he doesn't say anything about it. Instead, he feigns polite interest. "Oh? And what terrible things did you do?"

"I ran away."

"Is that all?"

Unconsciously she rubs at her neck. "Yes. That's bad enough."

He doesn't disagree with her as he guides her back down on to the mattress.

Long after Klaus falls back asleep, Elena lays awake.

Elijah's words— _It's pointless to run… Klaus will find you wherever you are—_ reverberate through her as she puts the pieces of her memories— _Katerina and Tatia's memories_ —together.

 

* * *

 


	17. Chapter 17

* * *

 

Sometimes when she dreams Katherine's memories, the taste of them is more sweet than sour.

There are, after all, months and months of Damon and Stefan that she never would have had if not for these… fragments.

_The sun spills silver light into the bedroom—Damon's arms catch her about the waist, and even though she could snap him like a twig without breaking a nail, she still lets him lead. "What are you doing?" she giggles just before she flips them over and pins him against the mattress._

or

_The smell of Stefan's skin, the feel of his live veins under her lips as he moves against her—the sweet, hesitant innocence that she'll take from him, just as her own was taken from her centuries ago._

And if some of her memories are more terrible than beautiful… she can live with that.

 

* * *

 

The urge to go hits her like a battering ram. She can't say why she wants to go where exactly she does, why she wants to leave England behind her, but she can point in the exact direction she would let her feet carry her if Klaus would walk with her.

She asks him, casually, about it. She tells him, "I think we should go _that_ way," and points her finger across the continental span.

"Sweetheart, I'm not even sure where _that way_ is."

Sometimes, though, he pulls out his mapbook, the one he's been amalgamating for as long as they have been together, and he studies it long enough for Elena to know that he's considering her words.

One day, he tells her, "Point again."

Elena turns and points behind him, displaying the unerring accuracy of this unyielding desire.

Something settles on Klaus's face, then, but he doesn't say anything to her about what he thinks.

 

* * *

 

She flips through Klaus's mapbook, that night, when he's asleep and looks more man than wolf— _more boy than man_.

Elena traces her fingers over the carefully drawn rivers, the tiny, script labels— _Tuscany?, Toulouse, Kent?, ?._ There are more question marks than anything else. She wonders, what it must be like for him to live like this, to barely recognize anything at all.

Except they recognize each other.

Elena sits in the dark and thinks about where she wants to go. She pulls her finger over the pages, in the direction she knows she would follow, careful not to smudge what might be the only up to date atlas in existence, but stops abruptly. She pulls her finger away from the page and squints at the label.

Bulgaria.

She ponders that for a long time. She _remembers_ Bulgaria. Both Tatia and Katerina were born there. Klaus's parents were born there. She taps the page uncertainly. Flips through the book, looking for a distraction as she works the thought over in her mind.

A drawing falls out, onto her lap.

Gingerly, Elena picks it up by the corners, and is surprised when she feels animal skin under her fingers rather than paper. _Vellum_ , she thinks. She remembers Klaus taking this from the New York apartment all those years ago. Careless of him, to have left it tucked into his atlas rather than putting it back—But there's no place to put anything back these days at all.

Elena holds the drawing up to the moonlight, so she can see it better.

The first thing Elena notices is the beauty of the page. Crushed gold and precious minerals gleam on the page, where someone— _Niklaus?_ —had inked a portrait of a girl.

The girl on the page stares back at her with dark, wild eyes. It's the most noticeable thing about her, because the rest is a faded, medieval rendering of what Elena knows to be _herself_.

On some level, Elena understands it must be Tatia's face she looks upon. In her mind's eye, she holds this image against the portrait of Katerina, and against her own self-image. It's all her, her, her, duplicated and reflected back again and again. But this drawing is as much a drawing of herself as it is of Tatia, as it is of Katerina.

There's no way to reconcile this fissuring within herself. Everyday she feels herself slipping more into who those other Petrova women were, and she realizes how little there is standing between Elena Gilbert and her forebears.

Elena tucks the portrait back into the book and returns to bed.

The man in the bed belongs to her, because he belonged to Katerina and Tatia once upon a time as well.

 

* * *

 

Tatia's memories are not so easy for her to live with. Her exiled journey across the ocean, the birth of her fatherless child, the loneliness—all of it is terrible and sad in its own way. But the worst is _Niklaus—_

_His smile, open and warm. His hand pressing her palm the first warm gesture she's received since coming here—she loves him, because he's the one who doesn't care that she came here heavy with another man's seed, because he wants her and cares nothing that his father forbids the match._

_It's a small village, and it's only a matter of time until they meet. He stands behind his elder brother—_ Elijah _she has heard him called—and his cold-faced father. The sun catches his hair, and it sparks like glowing embers in the afternoon light. Her brother speaks to his father as Tatia holds a basket of metalwork for Mikael to inspect. Mikael indicates a cruelly wrought hunting knife, and her brother plucks it up for him to inspect._

_It's not much, but Niklaus speaks to her when no one is paying attention, tells her, "I haven't seen you before—" and she cuts him off, "I haven't left my brother's house much." But from the taken aback look on his face, she realizes he meant the question in innocence, and she regrets her harsh tone. "I am sorry, I do not get much kindness."_

_Niklaus looks at her steadily, and offers her, "I don't get much kindness either."_

_She does not know what to say to him so she says nothing at all, looks away instead to the other three men in their group._

_Tatia and her brother do not stay much longer, but she can feel Niklaus's eyes on her until they leave._

_Niklaus comes to her brother's house that night. She sees him out the window, sneaking through the still dark. If his hair had not been so bright, he may have snuck right past her._

" _What are you doing here?" she whispers from the window when he creeps closer._

" _You said you don't leave your brother's house much—I've come to help you out."_

" _I cannot leave—" She sickens as she prepares to tell him her situation, because he cannot want her company once she admits, "I have a babe to care for."  
_

_He surprises her when he tells her, "I know." Tatia feels some mortification as she thinks of how everyone here must know her story, but he relieves her of her fears when he tells her, "Your brother told my father how you lost your husband in the Old World." It's a lie, but she feels helplessly thankful to her brother for having told it. He peers inside at the quiet cradle. "But she sleeps now. Couldn't you step out for just a moment?"_

" _I cannot."_

" _Another time then." She doesn't ever agree, but he continues to return to her, night after night, nonetheless._

_He keeps coming to her, and the loneliness she had worn like a cloak lifts from her shoulders. She tells him her secrets—the truth, the first amongst them, falling past her lips one night before she can stop herself—and he does not care._

_She's a girl again with Niklaus—she's not ready to be locked away at fourteen, and as much as she loves the little girl she nurses at her breast, she doesn't want to end her days trapped under her brother's roof._

_A year wheels and turns into another. At fifteen, Tatia is the most beautiful woman in the village by far. Men have begun to pay her mind, and she finds she likes the attention._

_And when Niklaus comes to her window on the anniversary of her birth, she is fearless and ready to creep through the night with him._

_She wonders if he will kiss her, but he never does, and so they run wild through the woods together, and she is happy in this simple joy. She's fearless and ready to run through the woods, fast now that the baby's weight has come off of her, too spritely for Niklaus to catch her—_

_But everything changes when they do not return before dusk one night, and she hits her head and bleeds all over him. He tells her, "No blood of your body could ever harm anything of mine."_

_He says that nothing will change, but everything does._

_For the first time in a year, Niklaus does not come to her window the next night._

_Another year passes, and he ignores her._

_It's not long after her sixteenth birthday that Elijah begins paying her court. And she finds herself charmed against her expectations._

_Elijah understands her, she realizes, in some sad and gentle way that she had not expected of him. He's had too much put on him too early, is too old for his years—and despite the fact that she wants to be_ young _, that she wants to be just a girl, she's not. Hasn't been since she gave her virtue to a man who didn't love her and bore the consequences in salt and sweat._

_Tatia falls in love with Elijah without really meaning to, and by the time Niklaus comes back to her, it's too late to go back._

_Niklaus shows up again at her window, the first time he has since their ill-fated twilit run._

_She toys with the idea of ignoring him altogether, to treat him as he did her, but her heart is too soft for that and she opens the window to him as though he hadn't stayed away from her at all._

_Rather than wait for her to come out to him, as he has in the past, he crawls into her room and stands silent in the corner, observing the night time shadows, the little fast girl asleep in the miniature bed Elijah had built for her._

_Niklaus has never looked more like a boy, a child, really, than he does to her in that moment, the uncertain slope of his shoulders such a stark contrast to his brother's assured and world-weary stance._

" _Well?" Tatia finally prods him. "Have you come just to stare?"_

_Niklaus turns to her. Dissatisfied by simply looking at her, grabs her by the shoulders. "I wanted to come to you, this past year. I really did."_

_Tatia shrugs out of his grasp. "Then why didn't you?" she asks, careful to keep the hurt from her voice._

_He looks away. "My father—he watches me, constantly. I couldn't risk coming to you, not when he suspects…"_

" _Suspects what?"_

_Niklaus meets her eyes, then. His gaze doesn't have an ounce of condemnation in it, only something else—something pure and heavenly—love. "How I care for you," he tells her as he places a hand to her neck. He pauses to collect himself, brushes a thumb over her rapidly beating pulse. "That night—the night you hit your head and we returned home late—my father was waiting for me."_

_Tatia frowns. She knows how Niklaus does not get along with his father, but surely…?_

" _My father had figured out with whom it was I was spending my nights." Here Niklaus pauses, his jaw clenched, before continuing. "He forbade a match between one of his children and a lowly blacksmith's sister with a child on her hip. His pride would not allow it. I haven't dared see you since, lest you receive the brunt of his rage."_

_Tatia knits her brow, trying to understand. Her heart believes him, and yet— "But Elijah courts me in openly."_

_There's anger in Niklaus's eyes when he looks at her next. "_ Yes _, Elijah courts you openly. And opens your legs as well, I dare say."_

_Tatia slaps him. "You left me a year ago, Niklaus. Don't play the jealous lover when you were the one who stayed away."_

_Niklaus takes a slow step toward her. He catches her about the shoulders and crushes her to his chest. "I'm so, so sorry, Tatia," he breathes into her hair. "Please. I just want—I just want to go back to how things were before. I just want for us—" He stumbles over his words here, trying to find the magic phrase that will return them to when they were just a girl and a boy, but she doesn't give him any clues. Frustrated, he smashes his mouth against hers._

_The kiss is clumsy, and he knocks his teeth against hers painfully a few times before he gets used to the rhythm of it. And then it's good, no better—it's_ perfect _._

_Elijah wants to marry her. She thinks that if he asks, she will say yes. When he made love to her the first time, it was slow and lovely and tender. She loves Elijah, doesn't want to let go of what she has forged with him._

_But she will never let go of Niklaus. He is an addiction she can never be rid of, her heart's true mate. She believes that for certain when he pulls her to her bed, strips her of her gown with trembling, virgin's fingers and lays naked atop her for a moment. He kisses her languorously, and when he stops, she can hear his breathing loud in her ear._

" _Niklaus," she murmurs. "My love, my beautiful, golden boy. Niklaus." It's pure lover's talk as she strokes his hair, but it's enough to get him moving again._

_Niklaus pushes himself inside of her, and she bites her lip to stifle the moan that might wake her daughter. He is rougher than her brother, pushes himself deeper, stretches her farther, until the union with his flesh becomes a hot, painful thing._

_It seems at times that all she has ever known is pain. Tatia has learned to live in pain, to pick her joys from the fires of it. Niklaus is a joy and a wonder, and she will have him._

 

* * *

 

Niklaus is gone when it happens.

Elena is asleep, dreaming of being another girl, or maybe that other girl is herself, she never knows anymore—except when she feels the hand, hot against her face, she has to blink several times before she realizes the year is 2013 and not 975.

It's late afternoon, and Elena can almost imagine that she's warm when the sun slants down like this.

Elena turns into the hand, murmurs "Klau—" before she sees the dark, unfamiliar eyes, bloodshot and hungry and she knows—another vampire has found their hideout, and Klaus isn't here to save her.

It's a moment that's achingly familiar, the unnaturally heavy weight of a man-shaped predator's hand against her jaw—it's happened before, to Katerina when Trevor grasped her tight to smother her scream, and to Tatia when Klaus's father dragged her from her daughter and brought her to the fires—

Her stomach lurches, and hot sweat pops from the pores on her face as she twists out of this stranger's grip.

The vampire speaks then, croons in a language that she can't recognize before he clamps hard fingers around her wrists and drags her to him.

She doesn't have more than a second before she's in biting distance, but that's all it takes for her hand to grasp the curtain's edge, for Elena to use the vampire's own strength against him as he reels her forward. The motion tears the curtain free, spills sunlight into his withered face.

This isn't Elena's first time pulling this stunt. She recalls what seems like a lifetime ago, when she was _just_ the doppelganger, running from a rabid vampire.

The vampire shrinks into the back of the room as his skin sizzles—and Elena, for her part, yanks the window open and barrel rolls onto the front steps.

To her dismay, she sees the sun lowering on the horizon—she won't have long before the vampire follows her out.

She's outrun vampires before. Because the chase is in her blood, and because she knows how to run so far and so fast that she will never be caught, Elena takes off down the road, legs stretching and muscles yearning to get as much distance covered before sunset as possible.

If she is lucky, she will find someplace secluded to hide.

If she is very lucky, she will run into Klaus.

If she is unlucky, she will run until she is caught.

As it turns out, she is unlucky.

 

* * *

 

Lately, he's thought a lot about turning her. He fantasizes about what it would be like to keep Elena with him indefinitely—to teach her to hunt, to see the world in brighter lights and savor the sensations this life could bring her.

If circumstances were different, he would have turned her without hesitation. He'd have had his hybrid army, after all, his lethal dynasty with whom he would rule the world.

He'd set Elena on high as his queen, then. He would have taken her anywhere, everywhere she desired—But none of that had come to pass.

True, he is the last of the Original Family—but there is no world left to offer her, at least not while she lives. And he cares more for himself than he does for her, anyway.

The sacrifice of doppelganger blood. Part of him is tired of hearing those words—he'd looked forward to Elena's sacrifice with grim determination, to Katerina's with vindictive malice, because they wore Tatia's face, and he could never forgive them that—even as he wanted them for it.

He tries not to think of Tatia, but she keeps slipping in where he doesn't expect her. He notices with increasing unease the changing way Elena looks at him.

Something about the way she cocks her head sometimes, or the slow twist of her lips as she says his name, makes him shutter, even now.

He knows it must be a coincidence of a shared face—but he cannot shake his apprehensions.

He's thinking of Elena and Tatia and a little of Katerina, working that Gordian's Knot in his mind, when he comes home to find Elena missing, the bedding rustled, and the window open.

 

* * *

 

The feeling that bubbles in his blood is fury, hot and deadly, when he finds the bed he left his girl in empty, the sheets a rumpled mess, the stale smell of fear and dead, burning flesh still rank in the air.

But underneath that, the salt-rust of blood—familiar, live, doppelganger blood—he crawls over the bed until he can get to the window, where he sees Elena had cut herself on the metal slotting at the bottom of the sill in her hurry to leave the house. She had jumped through it—some hours ago, he would guess from the curtain ripped to the floor—sometime when the sun still shone and she still had time to run—

Klaus eases out the window, quiet, searching the air for another hint, something small and painful beneath his ribs hoping Elena had run fast and far enough.

It was such a small, frail little scent to follow—just a few drops of blood, every now and then—he imagines how it must have clung to her thigh, traced down her leg before hooking over her ankle, puddling in the shallow arch of bone before dripping into the dust.

He shakes his head, and the image replaces itself with another—the other vampire, lips to Elena's pale throat and teeth buried in her papery-thin skin.

He remembers when his parents took Tatia—he hadn't been there that time, either, had arrived in time only to discover her body, a terrible stillness to her face and an unnatural, blanched pallor to her sun-browned skin.

By the time he'd found her, he'd been a vampire already—had been able to sense her bloodlessness long before he dropped to the floor and clutched her to his chest, long before he'd felt the charred hair or seen her blistered skin, or worse, the long, white strips of knife-loosened flesh at her wrists, where his _loving_ parents had bled her dry for the sin of loving him.

He will not abide another repetition.

 

* * *

 

The vampire steals her away when she passes out from the blood-loss. Unlike Klaus, he does not replenish what he takes. Elena cannot understand his words, and he doesn't listen to hers.

Her captor is not so rabid from hunger that he's gone stupid. He remains careful to listen closely to her heartbeat, to draw only so much blood as will keep him from slipping into desiccation, when he bites her.

Elena isn't sure whether to be thankful for this reprieve. She's not ready to die—there's no one left to die for—but she wonders how long she can endure the tight pressure of this vampire's teeth embedded in her muscle, sharp against her clavicle.

She doesn't know how long this cycle of waking to his teeth in her flesh only to pass out again lasts, but finally, she wakes alone.

The scent of flesh rot pulls her to full wakefulness. Her stomach lurches, but she doesn't dry-heave when she spots the pile of drained human husks.

She crawls forward to inspect the bodies—multiple bite marks on all of them, skin ripped open and corpses mutilated—she gets it then. It's to be a slow march to her death, prolonged so that her kidnapper can get as much from her body as possible before disposing of her.

The room—dirty blanket on the floor, windows boarded up, allowing only occasional cracks of daylight through—is clearly part of a nest.

That's good, she thinks. A permanent home can be tracked, and if anyone will find her, it will be Niklaus—except, of course, Niklaus had been too late _before_ , and again, after that, had never even found her for five-hundred years. She doesn't have five-hundred years for him to find her.

As always, she must rely upon herself.

She's shaky on her legs when she rises to her feet, but she refuses to collapse back onto the blankets and wait for the vampire's return.

Elena tests the door, finds it unlocked—perhaps, she thinks, she was never supposed to regain consciousness. Klaus's blood—she'd consumed so much of it, every time he fed she'd drink it down—it was healing her faster than a normal girl, and maybe that small advantage would save her now.

 _Always creeping through houses, slinking through shadows,_ she thinks as she eases into the darkened hallway.

She can feel the chill in the floorboards, the bone-dry air she sucks down into her lungs an icy weight that settles in her stomach.

A door opens down the hall—Elena ducks into a closet, holds her breath as a girl wanders toward her. Elena can hear the girl's heart beat. She is so close as she passes, she can smell the sweat on the girl's neck. The girl is human—Elena knows this with a clarity she cannot trace—and the knowledge of the life in this girl's veins makes Elena _hungry_ for a moment before she collects herself.

She wonders if the girl is another victim. The girl can't be more than seventeen— _the age she had been_ , _once_ —a child, then, when the world may as well have ended.

Elena trails after her down the hall. If the girl turns, she will see her—and Elena cannot allow that, not yet. She isn't sure what she will do if that happens. She has no weapon, no blunt objects with which to defend herself—just her bare hands. It will have to do, if the girl turns on her—if not, Elena will make sure they both get out, if possible.

And then she will go. Bulgaria still beckons her, and she can only ignore the pull for so long.

She follows the girl, to the other side of the house, but stops at the door to one of the front rooms.

At first, she doesn't understand what she's seeing.

The girl is hunched over in the corner, her shoulders working as she pulls—there's a soft _pop_ from where the girl crouches.

Elena skirts into the room, edges her way against the wall until she sees the girl, her fingers pushing raw meat into her mouth, lips a red-ring of dripping viscera. In the girl's lap is a human arm, torn from the shoulder joint.

Distantly, before the nausea or the fascination can hit her, she notices the cross-hatch of bite-marks on the arm, identical to the ones beginning to decorate her own.

Elena backs out of the room. She should've left right away—she's already wasted too much time investigating. She dashes back into the hallway. She'll find a door, slip into the day, and she'll run until her brain stops burning and her heart stops aching.

She runs into the damn vampire again though, and he knocks her out.

 

* * *

 

_Her brother and his wife have gone to bed, but she is till awake, rocking her daughter to sleep by the hearth and signing softly to her when they come for her._

_It starts with a pounding at the door that grows louder and more urgent, until the frame cracks and Mikael and Esther step in from the night._

_Her heart hammers in her breast._

" _What has happened?" she gasps, sure some ill has befallen Elijah, (or worse) Niklaus._

_She never gets her answer._

_Mikael grabs her, and when her screams pull her brother from his bed, Esther does_ _something_ _that makes him drop stone dead._

_Her sweet daughter screams, a baby still, really, and Tatia begs Mikael and his witch of a wife not to harm her. Against her expectations, they grant her that one mercy.  
_

_They drag her from her home. Mikael's grip on her arm grinds her muscle into the bone, the pain a sweet horror under the endless canopy of night stars._

_All is darkness, until Mikael lets her go, falls away from her, and the fires rise from nothing, so hot and so fierce she can feel the flesh of her face burning, her hair crisping._

" _What have I done?" she screams, but they either cannot hear her or do not care. "Why are you doing this to me?"_

_She stands in the circle, heat-sick, trapped like an animal—until the flames fall, and Mikael grabs her wrists and slits them through with the cruel knife her brother had sold to him two years ago._

_The blood pours from her, and she never knows why they hurt her._

_In the last moment, she doesn't remember Elijah or Niklaus, but thinks of home, of her mother and father in Bulgaria, and she regrets that now she'll never go home again._

 

* * *

 

The vampire is drinking from her femoral artery when she gasps awake.

The pain of it is sharp and familiar, the fan of breath against the sensitive skin of her inner thigh a well-worn memory.

_Once, there had been no such things as vampires._

He raises his head, teeth slicked red with her blood, and runs a thumb over the other side of her inner thigh, where Klaus had left a scar months before he began giving back what he took.

She still cannot figure out exactly what language he speaks—something from the far West, she thinks, suddenly certain that she would get it if he were speaking anything remotely Slavic—but she gets the gist of what he means when he presses his thumb to the scar and speaks, eyes heavy upon her.

"Klaus gave me that scar," she informs him. She grazes her fingers against the side of her neck, a challenge in her eyes. "And this one too."

Something like recognition flickers across the vampire's face at the name—he repeats it, spitting, before bowing his head back to the work of draining her.

Elena lies back, limp and sick from the whole thing. Her head rolls to the side, and she sees the girl from earlier standing in the doorway, a shade really, just a wisp of a figment of a girl.

The vampire looks up at her and beckons her over.

The girl kneels by him, shuts her eyes as he tucks her hair behind her ears and traces his finger down the slope of her nose.

Elena sees it, then, what this is—this duo's own particular brand of cohabitation, sharing the human bodies that the vampire brings in—there's an affection that links the two of them.

She wonders what her arrangement with Niklaus would look like to prying eyes.

The girl is the weak spot here. If it comes to it, Elena will need to use her as leverage, the way she herself had been used by so many before.

Better yet, she could use the vervain in her watch. Pull it out and ingest it so that next time the vampire bites her, he drops, and she could stake him then and there.

To do that, though, she'll need to get through this moment.

She doesn't anticipate the girl's hunger. The girl leans into the vampire's touch, exhales a request that Elena understands from the glint in the girl's eyes.

Elena too is hungry. Weak with it, this emptiness, desperate to make it stop—except when she fantasizes about it, she thinks about blood—she thinks about hearts pumping and scorching liquid heat, and what it fees like to feed and fuck until whatever is missing is almost found again.

She felt like that with Stefan and Damon. She feels like that with Klaus.

The vampire nods at the girl, moves back a few inches so the girl can lean over her.

Elena's vision is black around the edges, strobing with every beat of her heart. Her limbs are heavy, but she's not about to give up on this life.

The girl leans in and Elena sees the knife. She kicks and struggles then, but the vampire holds her down.

The girl cuts a thin line down Elena's stomach, presses her mouth to the welling blood and parted flesh and nibbles at the cut.

She's not sure whether to be in pain or revolted.

Klaus arrives on scene before she can decide.

 

* * *

 


	18. Chapter 18

* * *

 

 

Klaus isn't sure what he had expected, when he had smelled the flesh-rot and the metallic blood-rust from the front lawn. The usual, he supposes—a pile of unburied bodies stacked like corn husks in the corner. A menagerie of unbathed, malnourished human livestock. A filthy, idiot nest of vampires without enough sense to stay away from what is his.

The cloying scent of Elena's blood hangs in the humid air inside the house. He can smell it from the moment he steps through the front door. She has bled in this house, and bled a lot.

He can hear three heart-beats coming from the back of the house. Two human, one vampire, he thinks. Only vampires sound that healthy these days. But soon they won't, either. Desiccation will get them all, in the last—everyone but him.

He steps into the room and breaks the vampire's neck before his victim's reflexes even pick up the sound of him stepping through the front door.

Kneeling on the floor, huddled over Elena, is a human girl—a child, really, who looks up at him with blood-flecked lips and starving eyes. The vampire's beloved, he surmises. Her fingers are a sticky red mess on Elena's abdomen.

He knows just what to do with her.

 

* * *

 

The warmth of Klaus's blood revives Elena from the numb stupor that had threatened to pull her under when the vampire and his... lover? pet?... had fed on her.

She realizes that Klaus has pulled her into his lap, that she is slumped against his chest, legs akimbo.

Klaus rubs her back as she drinks, and when she tries to move away, he keeps his wrist firmly pressed to her lips until he has inspected her wrists, legs, thighs, neck, torso, skull. When he finally does disengage his wrist from her mouth, he turns her around so that he can examine her face.

There's a darkness in his eyes, different from what she is used to with him. It reminds her of terrible things—the night she bargained with him for Caroline and Tyler's lives, the night she found him on the battlefield and told him to _wait_ —it's all there, and something _else,_ something she wants to pin down from another time, another place—

"Niklaus," she murmurs, more a question than anything else, as she presses her palm to the rough grain of his cheek. The name tastes familiar in her mouth.

He pulls back from her as if she had stricken him.

From behind her, she hears a groan, and realizes that the other vampire is still alive.

"Ah, so our friend here has finally chosen to awaken," Klaus announces, false cheer in his voice. He stands, and makes it clear to her that he wants her to stay in her place, off to the side.

She casts a glance around the room. They're exactly where they were before, except the vampire is sprawled in the corner with a makeshift stake jammed into his shoulder, keeping him weak and immobile. The cannibal girl lies unconscious on the floor, until Klaus steps over to her and pats her cheek.

"Elena, dear," he calls to her. "Do you recall the promise I made to you? About what I would do to any vampire who took you from me?"

All too clearly.

"Yes," she tells him, throat aching. "But that girl is human."

"So she is. Do you think our vampiric friend will mind, then, if I break these delicate fingers?" He snaps them loose as he speaks. "Or perhaps shatter this lovely joint at her shoulder?" Klaus glides his fingers over the girl's shoulder bones. The touch looks gentle, even as the girl's shoulder distorts liked warped glass under his fingers.

The girl screams, and the vampire howls.

Klaus saunters over to him. "Do you know who I am?" He asks as he wipes the girl's blood on the vampire's shirt.

The vampire stares at him, mouth agape. There's fear in his eyes, she realizes. Fear that's stricken him mute.

"No?" Klaus presses. He smiles. "I'm kind of a big deal, you know."

The vampire gurgles something at him, just before Klaus rips his tongue out by the root. Something like— _"Klaus_."

"Oh, so you do know who I am. Good." He tucks the tongue back into the vampire's mouth and pushes it so far to the back of his throat that he begins to choke on it.

None of this bothers her as much as it should. The sights, the sounds, the smell of that very human girl—they incite in her a giddy hunger. She wants to watch, even as she wants to retch and retch until she coughs up her heart.

These are vampire instincts warring with human sentiments, she realizes, a thick soup of Petrova legacy and a doom shared by all of them that sits like fetid mud inside of her.

She should tell him to stop. She shouldn't let him pull this girl apart—except she is so far gone, she can't find the words to tell Niklaus _why_ he should stop.

She looks into the vampire's eyes and finds the answer to the question she had asked herself earlier, when she had observed the twisted tenderness between the vampire and his human and wondered what her relationship with Klaus would look like to them.

There is no tenderness between herself and Klaus. Only the repetition of a certain fate, and the desire to break the hold it has on them both.

 

* * *

 

Later, when his hands itch from the salted blood that cakes to his skin, and both the vampire and his human are dead, the girl's blood a wasted puddle on the floor as a declaration of his spite, he turns back to Elena and studies her.

He would not have stopped even if she begged, but he cannot tell if he is more surprised that she didn't raise a single plea for their lives or that he had not expected her to at all.

She has not looked him directly in the eye since earlier, when she called him—

"Niklaus." She stares at him, eyes wide and dark, waiting. "What's different this time?"

"About what just happened?" He gestures at the corpses. "Well, to begin, you didn't have a knife to counter-offer with."

She frowns, as though she doesn't see his meaning. "No, Niklaus. Not about me letting you kill them. I'm asking you why you came for me. You've never cared to save me before. When I died—" She snaps her teeth shut, and he hears them chink hard against each other. She turns to look away, and in that unnaturally unfailing way, she turns toward Bulgaria.

He stays away from her when he speaks. She terrifies him, when she's like this.

"Tatia?" It's a guess, wild and out of the dark. Her name burns in his throat.

Her breath hitches. "What's different, Niklaus? _Tell me._ " It's Tatia who looks up at him, who stands to her full height to approach him like a prowling animal. " _Tell me._ "

"Your death belongs to me, this time," he snaps. " _You_ belong to me, even unto death."

She relaxes, visibly, when he answers her, and the ghostly mirage passes before his eyes as though it had never been at all.

 _Elena_ turns toward him and, in that hard-hearted Petrova voice, informs him, "I'm going to Bulgaria. I'm going back to where it all began."

He feels ill. When had she become so mercurial? When had she stopped looking at him with just Elena's eyes?

She crooks her lips into a smile. "You're invited, if you'd like to come." She pauses, almost off-handed. "I would like it, if you came."

 

* * *

 

She can feel it, the feeling of _right_ that settles into her as Klaus—Niklaus?—leads her across the spine of Europe, into the Petrova homeland.

She can feel him watching her, always watching her—he has _always_ watched her.

Niklaus calls her Elena, so she supposes that is who she must be—although, as far as she can tell, she is as much _Tatia_ or _Katerina_ as she is _Elena_. Any which way, it doesn't particularly matter, because he is the constant in her life. Whether he be a man or a vampire or a hybrid, he is the one true thing the memories impinging upon her heart have in common.

Since the episode with the vampire back in England— _Engelond, it was called_ _when she first came there—_ he has stayed with her constantly, unwilling to leave her side.

They bed down each night, and he refuses to feed from her for weeks following her kidnapping. She can see how the skin beneath his eyes has taken a gray tinge as of late, and she worries that he will grow weak if she does not feed him soon.

"It's not fair, for you to take care of me, when I do nothing for you," she tells him as she wipes blood from her chin, as she watches his wrist knit back to perfect, fresh flesh.

They are lying in a barn, on a broken bed, and above them, the night sky is visible through holes in the ceiling.

"I would take more from you than I give," he tells her before rolling away from her, to the other side of the bed.

He's lying, and she knows it. There has been a wariness about him when he looks at her, a suspicious air to him that had existed for a while now, but had been made manifest only when she declared her decision to go to Bulgaria.

She clambers into his lap, a thigh pressed to each side of his ribcage, and tells him firmly, "No blood of my body could ever hurt anything of yours. If you believe that, you will drink."

His lip twitches, a vicious snarl curling over his face as his teeth elongate and sharpen, before piercing the flesh and bone of her wrist.

It's a pain too sweet and sharp to bear. She gasps and rocks herself against him.

Niklaus does not want to respond, but he also cannot help himself. He's as powerless to the will of her body as he has ever been, and before long, his hips begin to roll, and the pressure of his arm braced behind her back becomes more a constriction than a means of support while he feeds from her.

"Please," she mutters. "I need—I need to—" She does not know what she needs. Frustrated, she fumbles with the waistband of his pants, tries to pry them down his hips and push her own clothing aside without slowing the grinding rhythm of their bodies. Finally, he lifts his hips enough for her to find the right position, and she exhales in sudden relief as he fills her.

He looks so young from this angle that she can almost forget who and what he is—except she doesn't love him _in spite_ of those things, but partially _because of_ those things. She recalls centuries' worth of bloodshed and merriment, all of Katerina's bitterly fond memories, and she cannot find it in herself to condemn the same behavior in Klaus. She appreciates, in ways she never had before, his determined defense against the malaise of eternity, his ability to see humor in the everyday when _nothing_ ever seems new or surprising anymore. And she remembers him from his human life, when Niklaus had given her the first true kindness she had ever known. She recalls the high summer of Tatia's adolescence with him, what it was like to feel like a woman and a child all at once in his company. And when coupled with Elena's own troubled history, the tragedy and the hope he somehow put back into her—

He is a revelation to her.

She can feel the heat of him as he pauses fully inside of her. She luxuriates in the feel of his fingers braceleting her arms, in the slick fission between them as he lets her set the pace.

He calls her Elena as he pushes sweaty strands of hair from her face, but it's not enough, it's not enough because _she's_ too much—

She bites out, "Niklaus," low and lilted, and he stills completely.

He twitches inside of her, and she can feel the liquid heat leaking between her legs where their bodies are still joined.

She hasn't found her release yet, but he doesn't shift, even to withdraw from her. Experimentally, she rolls her hips again, wondering if they could keep going—

He doesn't respond as she had thought he might. Instead, he places a finger directly on her clit. It's too much, too fast, and she comes hard with just a few flicks of his wrist.

All the while, Niklaus watches her.

They've never discussed what has changed between them. While she knows there is no way he can't have figured it out, he has never called her by any name other than Elena, save for that one instance.

 

* * *

 

They arrive in Bulgaria without set-back or obstacle.

Elena leads him there with unwavering confidence, as surely as a compass used to point North.

He had been reluctant to bring her here—he had no reason to believe Bonnie Bennett could be found nearby—yet he knew Elena would have found a way to leave, in that infuriating Petrova way, whether or not he came with her.

She's a puzzle that's starting to come together, and he wishes he knew what the finished image meant. He's _certain_ that Tatia and Katerina must somehow be impugning upon Elena's psyche—he just doesn't know _how_. More disturbing yet has been her unshakeable desire to see Bulgaria, her ability to locate it without a map of any sort.

When they get to their first Bulgarian town, though, she insists that they must keep going—and when she finally demands that they stop, he knows that they have come to the birthplace of Tatia and Katerina Petrova, although there is not a tree or a stone he recognizes. Like Elena, he knows the place, even when nothing remains to be known.

"Stay here, and don't come out, do you hear me, Elena?" Klaus asks her before he leaves her in a remote cottage in order to scout the area. He brushes a kiss against her hairline. "I'll be back shortly."

She would follow his instructions, as she knows she has so many times before—except the same pull that summoned her across the continent is still stuck under her skin, urging her toward the East…

She follows it, out across the ruins of a half-remembered town sunken into an earth turned to tar. Steaming mists rise from bubbling craters in the treacherous earth, shrouding the pre-dawn sun and weaving vaporous rainbows in the air.

Elena and Katherine see each other at the same time.

Doppelganger meets doppelganger as they crest the same hil, coming from different directions. The Katherine freezes when she spots her. She's almost just a walking skeleton, a filthy fragment of what she had been when food was plentiful and the sun shone more often. Yet she is still beautiful.

Elena reaches out and presses her hand to the column of Katherine's throat. Her doppelganger mirrors her movements. The ache that led Elena here flickers and dies at the first brush of skin on skin.

The world goes topsy-turvy as all sense of reality—past, present, and future—flutters out of her grasp. Somewhere along the way, with hands pressed over each other's hearts, who is Katerina and who is Elena gets lost. They stare at each other, unable to speak through the fog of muddled identity. They both struggle with the same question—who is who?— until the other girl's mouth twists and she finds the means to speak.

"I used to keep a journal," the other Petrova girl tells her. "That means I must be Elena."

The tone with which the other girl speaks stirs an irritated ache inside of her. She frowns. "No, that was me. _I_ used to keep a journal."

The other Petrova girl does not accept that answer. "Dear Diary," she begins, "Today will be different. It has to be. I will smile and be believable. I will no longer be—"

She cuts her off. "The girl who lost her parents. I will start fresh. Be someone new. It's the only way I'll make it through." She shakes her head. "I remember writing that the day I met Stefan." She looks at the other Petrova girl, arms folded under a sadly deflated chest. They are both so skinny, living off of nothing but the air they breathe now. And yet she feels hunger pangs when she studies the blue tracing of veins on the other girl's neck.

Perhaps the other Petrova girl had been right. Perhaps the other Petrova girl is Elena, and she is Katerina, come to break her rival's neck and guzzle down her blood.

Except when she regains focus, she sees the same longing on the other girl's gaunt face, and realizes that even her body's desire to slake its thirst with blood cannot be trusted.

She wonders if this will end with one of them vamping out and eating the other. She wonders why it hasn't happened yet, but draws no conclusions other than that neither is certain who the vampire among them is, and neither wants to push it in case it turns out to be the other.

The other girl almost surprises her when she strips from her shirt and unclips her bra and shows her a birthmark on her left side. She knows this should shock her, or make her blush. Yet she feels a strange sense of déjà vu about the scene, as though she already remembers it.

She responds in kind by ridding herself of her top and her bra and indicating her matching birthmark.

They trade birthmarks, scars, digits that have healed misshapen from past injuries. The inquiry leaves them both naked, identical almost exactly, save for the imprint of daily human life upon their skin. No sooner do they decide that having a particular mark or scar proves the identity of the other, than they both realize that they both remember receiving it, and then forget again what the differences between them were supposed to be.

It's infuriating. The last time they were together, Elena had shaken like a rabbit watching the fox when Katherine had walked into the room, and Katherine had had to physically restrain herself to keep herself from tearing Elena's throat out. Now they are naked and shivering in a fine Bulgarian mist, stuck in this frustrating cycle that neither can quite figure out how to escape.

It's enough to make them both laugh, because they cannot help but think the same things at the same time.

Eventually, they pull apart, and the other Petrova girl begins to speak, quietly, yet more coherently than she herself has felt in a long time.

"You felt it, didn't you? The pull—"

"Yes, but it's stopped now."

"For me too." The other girl brushes a hand over her collarbone. "When I found you." Her hand is soft and warm. Not a killer's hand at all.

And yet, it's the other girl whose head snaps up to look out into the distance. "I will come. Tonight," she mouths, just before she turns and disappears.

Watching the horizon where the other girl had disappeared with unnatural speed, she supposes she herself must be Elena after all. Klaus confirms her thoughts when he steps up behind her and calls her _Elena_ —she ignores the feeling that it no longer fits her.

 

* * *

 

"I'm not surprised, I suppose, to find Katerina alive and well." He shoves his hands into his pockets and stares into the distance. Is it worth pursuing her?

"She's not Katerina." Elena's voice cracks over the _K_. He can hear her dry throat click as she swallows. When was the last time she drank any water? "At least… Not entirely…"

"And who else could she be?"

She doesn't answer. Had he expected her to?

Elena walks a pace in front of him, in Katerina's direction. "You never loved Katerina, did you?" she asks. He wonders if she's even paying attention to him, or just musing aloud.

"Love is a vampire's greatest weakness," he tells her.

She nods. Doesn't she know it to be so? Hasn't she learned anything these last few years? She doesn't turn, but he hears her whisper all the same. "But you loved Tatia. And I think you always will." Elena turns, and the sight of her against the rising Bulgarian sun stirs a memory of a different moment, years distant now.

_In the burgeoning morning light, as the sun gilt her hair like honey and the blood trickled down her face, she could almost be…_

As ever, she is not wrong about him.

He hates her a little for it.

 

* * *

 

Niklaus leads her back to the cottage. The temperature steadily drops throughout the day, and by mid-afternoon her limbs begin to feel numb. Niklaus pulls her to an empty bed and curls against her, but he is not enough to warm her. Eventually, he slits his wrist and offers it to her. "It'll warm you," he tells her.

The memory of the other Petrova girl's tempting blue veins is still with her, gnawing at her. She snatches Niklaus's wrist and smashes her lips to the wound.

"That's my girl," he murmurs, petting her hair while she drinks.

When she is finished, she feels warm and full and it is almost enough to make her feel better again. In a little while, she will persuade Niklaus to drink from her, and then they will both feel better, if only for a little while. She knows that this cannot go on for much longer. Their time is almost up.

The thought makes her needy. She tugs on Niklaus's shoulders to try to draw him nearer. "I want you," she murmurs.

He shakes his head. "Not tonight."

"Why? You've had me every other night."

"Have I?"

She closes her eyes. "Does it matter?"

He wraps his fingers around her throat. It's a possessive gesture, rather than a threatening one. Her heart never even speeds up.

"Yes. It always matters."

 

* * *

 

True to her word, the other Petrova shows up outside their cottage that night.

She can feel her double lingering silently in the shadows, waiting for her to come out. The feeling of the other girl, just out of reach, pulls her out the front door.

She wonders if rising from their bed will wake Klaus from his slumber. He sleeps so soundly, as though the way the very air freezes in their lungs at night does not bother him. As though he cannot sense the other Petrova girl just a few yards away.

The other girl emerges from the shadows to stand under the cold moonlight. "I almost didn't think you would come out," the Petrova girl calls. Her voice carries through the air like a gust of wind.

"I had no choice," she answers. "I had no choice but to come to Bulgaria and to find you."

"We never have a choice," the other girl informs her. "No choice but to yield to the men who fuck us and get us with child and live with the bitter shame of it." Her eyes soften, even as her mouth hardens. "No choice but to fall in love with the same men, again and again, and to taste their betrayal with our dying breath."

"It's different this time. Niklaus is different this time." She has no proof. Only a hope she already knows to be foolish.

The other girl crosses her arms under her breasts. "Niklaus never changes. Don't you know that?"

 

* * *

 

He can hear Elena talking to herself— _no_ , not to herself— _Katerina._

Neither of them even turn to look at him when he approaches them. He is close enough to twist Katerina's head from her shoulders. He hasn't seen her so unguarded since she was mortal.

"Niklaus never changes. Don't you know that?" Katerina spits.

"What's this I hear?" he asks as he steps up to them.

They both turn to look at him at the same moment. The duplication is unfathomable. The cruel twist of Elena's mouth, the soft, yearning glimmer in Katerina's eyes—it's all mismatched, all mixed up.

They step up to him, defiant and righteous. Tatia had come to him like this so often in the final weeks of her life.

"Will you kiss us?"

"Or kill us?"

"Which will it be?"

He had been prepared to play the villain here—he had relished the idea, even, of what he might do to Katerina now that she had so easily fallen back into his hands. And as for Elena—he was sure he could conceive of something fitting, to teach her the costs of going behind his back. Now, with the two of them circling him, he cannot bring himself to act or to answer.

Bonnie Bennett chooses that moment to join them.

 

* * *

 


	19. Chapter 19

* * *

 

 

Bonnie Bennett emerges from the shadows. She's not the same girl he remembers from the night she nearly killed him—but then, none of them are the same as they were back then. Not even he has stood the test of time.

She's thinner, of course, a living corpse, like every other human he's come across. Yet beneath the sallow skin, the brittle bones and lank hair, there lurks a ferocity in the witch's eyes that he remembers well. It's a lethal bravery, a vicious determination that illuminates her face.

It's what's kept her alive.

"Katherine," Bonnie calls. "I told you not to wander far."

He sees the moment the witch spots Elena. She freezes when she sees her, takes a long critical note of the three of them together and gives him a hard glare. "Elena?" she ventures at last, voice high and hopeful. She edges toward Elena and Katerina the way one approaches a skittish animal.

Katerina turns to smile at the witch. Klaus recognizes that smile. Elena had sometimes given it to him, years ago now. He feels a twist in his gut when he sees it, because he hasn't seen that guilty, fond smile in years. Not since that day they stumbled across Caroline, and Elena realized that the world was more than just the two of them.

"I had to go, Bonnie. I felt her here," Katerina explains, pointing to Elena. There's none of the usual tease in her pout. "I felt her and I had to draw nearer." The affection in her voice as she speaks to the witch sounds genuine.

Bonnie ignores her companion. She takes another step closer, hand outstretched toward his girl. "Elena?"

Elena does not respond to the witch outright. Instead, she shifts her weight from foot to foot as she looks from him to the witch. She's conflicted. A moment away from choosing a side in the battle she knows is coming. All this time together, and she has still never quite forgotten Bonnie Bennett.

Klaus clears his throat. "Lovely as this chat has been, I'm afraid we'll have to be going soon. You see, I have a witch in the Americas who's agreed to do a little spell for me, and I'm loathe to keep her waiting now that our party is assembled." He smiles and lunges for Bonnie.

The witch is quick. She gets inside his head before he can wrap his fingers around her throat, and suddenly, it's as though he is living through the night of the sacrifice all over again. Her power drills into him, forcing his innards apart, tearing the immortality his mother bestowed upon him from his soul.

It had been like this before, that night when Elena's blood had still coated the corners of his mouth, sizzling with _power_ ; when the ache of breaking bones—of lupine transformation—had all too quickly turned to bright, hot pain.

He feels his heart squeeze and tremble. The muscle rends itself apart—his vision blackens—

She's dragging him toward a mortal doom and there's nothing he can do to stop her.

Elena throws herself into Bonnie. The pressure fades. Yet he is still weak, so terribly weak. The last time he'd been so vulnerable, Elijah had spirited him away. Without the witch's power tearing him apart, he had transformed into a wolf. Only the days spent ripping out throat after throat had replenished him. That road is closed to him this time around.

He clutches at his chest as he fights for composure, for a plan. How to muzzle the witch and mute her potency until he could hand her over to Sylvie? Would Elena be bargaining chip enough? And yet—she has saved him. He pushes the thought away before he can trace its implications.

Klaus staggers to his feet just as Katerina pulls Elena from atop Bonnie with inhuman strength. The two of them exchange words, but his ears ring too loudly for him to catch more than the bewilderment in Katerina's eyes, and the resignation in Bonnie's.

Elena twists in Katerina's grasp, weak as a newborn lamb in the lion's jaws. Something passes between them— they stare at each other as Katerina's eyes darken and her teeth sharpen. There's hunger in her blood-black eyes.

Every instinct he has tells him to get between Elena and the threat.

Once upon a time, he had promised to _protect_ her. Once, he had sought to possess her. He hates the idea that at this late juncture he could fail at both.

He's at a tactical disadvantage. Katerina is as unstable as Elena, as prone to impulse decisions as her doppelganger. She's as likely to snap Elena's neck as she is to drain her. He circles closer, searching for a way to separate the two, and then to close in on Bonnie without her magicks blocking him.

The witch raises her chin, teeth bared, so that she can look down her nose at him. She raises her palm when she speaks and stops him in his tracks. "Consider that last time a warm up, Klaus. Don't come any closer, unless you want to die here."

An impossible command to obey, with Elena standing behind her. He raises his arms, feigning defenselessness. "No such plans, I'm afraid."

Bonnie cocks her head. "What _are_ your plans?" She steps closer. A lesser vampire's instincts would force him to run, but Klaus stands still.

"Thought you didn't fancy them?"

"That depends. Who's your witch friend? What kind of spell do you have lined up?" Behind her, Elena thrashes in her captor's arms and Katerina snarls. He tenses, ready to brave the witch to wrest Elena free. Bonnie only glances at them for a moment before raising her hand and throwing Katerina off her quarry. "Stay away from her, Katherine," she orders, even as she raises an eyebrow at Klaus. "Well?"

"It's a little resuscitation spell. The kind that'll set this mess to rights."

"The mess your family started."

Klaus shrugs and slides his gaze over to Elena. She looks ruffled, but not much worse for wear. He's a little glad to see her find a dessicated branch and brandish it in Katerina's direction. Katerina, for her part, prowls like a panther in a cage, searching for a way through the bars. He turns his attention back to the witch. "My family may be to blame, but we both know who is to blame for awakening them from their eternal slumber."

Bonnie crosses her arms under her breasts. "So how does it work? Why do you need me for the spell?" He can tell from the way her eyes narrow that he's not going to fool her for a minute.

"I need a witch of your unique… _caliber_ … to serve as the focal point for my witch. It is a rather big mess, after all."

"You want this other witch to channel me." She says the words slowly, like she is letting the weight of them sink in. Her anger simmers just below the surface.

"Yes."

"So, what? I'm more useful as a battery than as a witch?"

"I very much doubt you have enough experience to perform this kind of dark magic. You would falter."

"You'd be surprised."

"Why risk it?" He offers his hand. "Say you perform the ritual—say you even knew how, on your own— and you fail. What would the consequences be? How many more would die? Come with me, and you'll be saving the world—ensuring whoever is left alive gets to _stay_ alive."

"Do you really expect me to fall for that?"

"I am appealing to your better nature, yes—surely that's something you still value?"

"Pretend it is. Pretend I agree to this suicide mission and go with you to meet this witch you've probably brainwashed so she can channel me. That can't be enough to reverse everything." She narrows her eyes. "What part are you leaving out? A spell of that magnitude would need a catalyst of some sort, another moonstone to bind it—" She freezes mid-sentence, and looks to his girl. "How long have you had Elena with you?"

"Jealous?"

"It's her. She's the catalyst. That's why you have her with you, in safe-keeping until you found me, isn't it?"

He doesn't answer her.

"How long have you been dragging her along with you? Months? Years? She's loyal to you. That's why she stopped me from hurting you earlier. How long does it take to build that kind of bond?"

"Longer than your lifetime, I'm afraid."

The witch watches the doppelgangers. Something has changed again between them—they're wary, circling each other again as though they have forgotten who the predator is between them. Katerina suffers from the same dislocation as Elena, it would seem.

Bonnie notices the shift between the doppelgangers as well. "I suppose I know what you mean." She pauses. "But I don't think you understand the why of it, do you?"

"And you do?"

"I do." She offers no more information. It's a deliberate ploy to get him to press her for it.

He considers whether this sidetrack is a feint. Perhaps she doesn't feel as confident in her powers as she says. Perhaps there was a reason for revealing herself _now_ and he's walked into a trap, perhaps, perhaps. All the same, he's hooked. This… _slippage_ Elena has been experiencing in her personality has only grown more pronounced, more worrisome over time.

"I'll admit I'm intrigued, Miss Bennett." He folds his hands behind his back. "Do go on."

"When I ran into Katherine a few years back, I knew immediately who she was—I could sense it as soon as I touched her. But the thing was, _she_ wasn't so sure who she was. She was completely muddled—it was like she wasn't sure whether she was Katherine or Elena or—" She stares hard at him. "Or the Original Petrova. Tatia."

He doesn't let Tatia's name ruffle him. "Sounds familiar enough, but so far nothing new."

Bonnie continues, as though he hadn't spoken. "She was crazy, swinging between the classic Katherine act and these weird moments where she'd _beg_ me to forgive her—she'd never say for what. Eventually, she just seemed to settle on the idea that I was her friend—and it didn't seem to matter who she was exactly, only that she loved me." She trails off, before abruptly changing the direction of the conversation. "Have you ever looked into how the doppelganger works, Klaus?"

"Of course. I did spend the better part of a millennium tracking them down. I think I recall how it works—direct line descendents only, about every 500 years, blood is an unusually potent catalyst—" He waves his hand, as if to dismiss the rest of it.

"No, Klaus, I mean the mechanics of the doppelganger. The _reason_ they could be sacrificed in the first place."

"Enlighten me."

"Elena and Katherine aren't just physical copies—their souls, their _life force_ —would have to be exact duplicates as well in order for the sacrifice to have worked."

Klaus shrugs. "I have to say that all makes sense—what with Tatia's blood being used to seal the hybrid curse, it stands to reason that only her blood—or as you say an exact duplicate—could unseal it. Every curse needs a way to be undone to keep the balance, so the doppelgangers arose. But what's your point? How does this have anything to do with their… identity crises?"

"Don't you get it? Elena and Katherine are supernaturally created duplicates. The doppelganger may have been created to strike the balance after Tatia's blood sealed your hybrid form, but they're still inherently _unnatural_. It's a huge magical drain maintaining their individual identities, keeping the walls up between their psyches. With everything that's happened the last few years— the magics are a mess. The magics are down, the walls between them, the ones that were keeping Elena _Elena_ and Katherine _Katherine_ … And Tatia _Tatia_ … They're non-existent." She sighs. "The magic's irrevocably screwed up, and Elena's paying the price for it."

"I see." He does see. And the possibilities are more interesting than he dared hope. "And what would happen, if this were left unchecked?"

"So long as nature was left this imbalanced? Eventually, I think the dominant personality would take over. I've seen it, with Katherine—maybe she's further along than Elena, maybe not, but she's losing herself more every day. And—I'm not sure who she's going to be when this is over."

 _Niklaus_ and _No blood of mine_ mingle in his thoughts.

A thrill runs through him. If he lets this go—doesn't try to reverse this clusterfuck—then maybe he could have Tatia back. It would hardly take anything at all—just let Elena slip away. He's tempted.

But why would Bonnie Bennett want to tell him all of this?

"Klaus. I've seen how you've been looking at her. I know in that twisted heart of yours that you care about what happens to Elena. I know you want to save her as much as I do."

And so the feint reveals itself. Appealing to his better nature, after all. He lets her wait while he ponders everything she's just told him.

Elena stands just out of sight, almost within reach.

"I couldn't fix her without killing her anyway," he finally admits. "All this talk of saving Elena is just a dead end."

 

* * *

 

"So that's it?" Bonnie asks, somewhere out of her line of sight. "You're just going to follow through with whatever creepy spell you've got cooked up?"

"That's the plan, yes."

She has no idea what they're talking about. It's been difficult to concentrate on what Niklaus and Bonnie have been saying to each other with the other Petrova so near. She's heard bits and pieces, but it's all muddled, too complex for her to focus on right now when bigger problems are right in front of her. She flexes her fingers around the makeshift stake in her hand.

Her mirror is an abyss she cannot help but stare into until those black eyes swallow her. They circle each other, absorbed in this endless cycle. What else has there ever been, other than the two of them?

"What do you intend to do with her?" Bonnie asks, a good ten feet away. Her voice carries disembodied through the Bulgarian mist. They are all just ghosts, now, anyway. All of them. Remnants of another time, another place.

"It's quite simple, really," Niklaus responds. He has crept closer to her while she looked elsewhere. They stand close enough that she can see the quick flick of his eyes to her as he speaks.

Once, she wouldn't have understood the weight of his gaze. Once, she might have mistaken it for longing.

Niklaus smiles when he continues, but the expression is too terrible to hold any joy. "The only way to fix all this is by the sacrifice of doppelganger blood. An intuitive solution, I think."

He watches her, waiting for her response, she realizes.

What does it mean, that he cares enough for her to wonder how she'll take his news? He had not cared so much for Katerina's feelings in 1492, nor Elena's in 2010. Why care now?

_They only want us to fuck us and to use us. To spill our blood over some silly little rock._

There's truth in those words, she _knows_ it.

She sees movement from the corner of her eye. The other Petrova's face twists in fury. Her mirror shrieks and launches herself at Niklaus.

She does not think before she acts. There's not time for that. She's not as fast as Niklaus, or as powerful as Bonnie, but she is as deadly as her double.

Instinct guides her. She has no choice but to intersect them, to throw herself in the other Petrova's path and hope she catches her. There's an impact—wind driven from her lungs in the familiar rattle of vampire collision. They drag each other to the ground. She feels the wood in her fist, almost warm from her grip, and drives it into the other girl's heart. Mortal or vampire, it doesn't matter. A rent heart kills her just the same.

She stares down into the other Petrova's eyes as her skin becomes ashen. Her jaw ticks, like she wants to speak, but it is too late.

She can sense both Klaus and Bonnie standing around her. In a moment, one of them will speak, and this moment will disapparate.

Later, she will ask herself why she threw herself between them. Niklaus had never been in any danger. How could he be? He would have batted her off like a gnat. And yet, it had been so terribly easy, never a choice at all when they were pitted against each other. She will tell herself this was kinder, to kill her rather than let Niklaus do it.

But right now, she holds her doppelganger, herself, and wonders.

What else has there ever been, other than the two of them?

 _Love_.

 

* * *

 

He does not know what to make of this. He has hunted Katerina in one way or another for the past five-hundred years. He's not sure he knows how to stop. And yet here he is, watching Elena drive her makeshift stake through her doppelganger's heart. It all ends, just like that.

He replays the moment over in his head. He reveals his plan, Katerina lunges for him, and Elena intercepts her. They drop, and Katerina dies. He wants to know _why_.

Bonnie bends down to brush Katerina's hair off of her face. It's a strangely tender gesture. Her eyes are on Katerina, but her words are all for Elena. "You know, I kept her with me because she was the closest I thought I would ever get to being with you again," she murmurs. "She wasn't you, not really. I know that. But I loved her, you know? I loved the parts of you that I saw in her." How unusual, to see tears gathering in this indomitable woman's eyes. Bonnie doesn't even seem to be aware that they are falling. "You did her a favor, Elena. She was in a lot of pain. She had all the memories of all the blood-soaked centuries she spent alone, and all of your compassion warring inside of her, tearing her apart. The guilt—it was eating her alive near the end. She was mad with it. This—this was kinder."

"I didn't do it to be kind."

The words draw Bonnie up short.

"Elena?"

Elena turns and looks at him. Her eyes are clear. "I did it for you, Niklaus."

He drops down level with her and grasps her chin. "She was never a threat, sweetheart."

"Wasn't she?" He almost expects her to add, _Aren't I?_

"Did you hear what I said? What I intend to use you for?"

"For the sacrifice. You need me to fix this disaster." She stares him down without giving him an inch of fear. He's always admired her spirit.

"You're not angry with me?"

Perhaps his mind is playing tricks on him—Elena looks more lucid than he has seen her in weeks, months maybe.

"You told me once that I could never be anything other than what I am. The same is true for you, too. You'll only ever be my death." She's looking at him with love in her eyes.

This is when he makes his decision.

Bonnie chooses this moment to interrupt them. "Elena, I see what you're doing. You can't just give in to him. You can't just let him win."

"Niklaus, just tell me. If I let you lead me to the flames—will Bonnie live? If Sylvie channels her, will she survive it?"

Not likely—but not impossible.

He looks to Bonnie. "I've thought of a way to save our girl after all. The question is: are you willing to go through with it? Willing to come with me, to meet my witchy friend?"

"That depends. What are you thinking?"

He pulls Elena away from Katerina's corpse. Just like this, in nighttime disarray, muddied and blooded, she reminds him acutely of the day they met again out on the battlefield. Love is a vampire's greatest weakness, and she is his.

Klaus takes a bite out of his wrist and offers her the bleeding wound, just like he has done countless times before.

"Tell me, Elena. How would you like to be a vampire?"

 

* * *

 


	20. Chapter 20

* * *

 

 

When everything is said and done and dead, it is inevitable that he should turn her.

The thought had often crossed his mind—but as things were, it had been impossible. He had needed her human to survive—her blood to keep his body strong, the ever-present challenge of her mortality to keep his mind sharp. And of course, the collapse of the psychic barriers between Elena, Katerina, and Tatia had presented their own problems. Strange, to have the Bennett witch put so succinctly what had been troubling him for years. It had been so difficult to look at Elena, in the end, when he wasn't certain she was looking back at him through those too-dark eyes. And yet, once Bonnie had given him the idea, the thought of letting Elena succumb, of coaxing Tatia into being within her, had been tempting. For just a moment, he had thought to reclaim the woman lost to him in the fires of the past.

But that moment had passed. Tatia's blood _had_ ruined him. And Elena's blood had done so much worse to him. He found himself caught in _that one's_ Petrova snare—or maybe, more astonishing still, in a net of Elena _Gilbert's_ own weaving. In either case, he did not think he could surrender her anymore than he could part with his own body.

Klaus takes the girl into his arms and sinks with her to the ground.

He glances at Bonnie Bennett, who stands with her arms folded under her breasts, silent and watchful. She nods slowly. From her, the gesture may as well have been her blessing.

Returning his attention to Elena, he cradles her against him and presses his wrist closer to her lips. "Drink, sweetheart. Before the wound closes."

For a moment, he fears that she will refuse him. He remembers the summer after the sacrifice, travelling with Stefan, before his plans had gone awry.

 _"It's a shame you didn't turn my doppelganger,"_ he'd mused one night amidst a pile of broken bodies.

Stefan had glanced up at him, blood smeared over his chin, wild eyes shifting into something more focused. Just for an instant, he forgot the dead woman in his arms to think back on another. He shook his head. _"Elena never wanted to be a vampire_."

_"Pity. It might have been fun to invite her along."_

He'd gotten his wish in the end, and he cannot bring himself to regret it.

"Elena," he murmurs, cupping the back of her head.

Her eyes roll up to meet his. He can see the question in her eyes— _Do you mean this? Do I want this?_ And, for what he hopes will be the last time— _Who am I?_

And one more thing, that he has seen in her eyes, in stray glances and late at night, when the moon is bright and she thinks he is asleep.

Elena clutches his wrist in both her hands and drinks deep.

Klaus lets the moment linger, and he fancies that she takes more than she needs to in order to stay a little longer like this.

They've done this together countless times—and yet, knowing that this will be the last time he has her like this is bittersweet. This will be the last time he lends her his strength, the last time he feels the magic pulse from his blood into hers. The last time a woman with her face truly needs him.

He's doing this so that the two of them may go on, so that Elena will have a future once the sacrifice is over. It's an ending all the same. He does not know how to define himself outside of the age-old hunt for the woman with her face. It never occurred to him that one day she would stop running.

Finally, Elena drops his wrist. A drop of blood pools at the corner of her mouth. In the east, the sun rises and gilts her hair like honey. The image of her, just like this, is how he will always remember her from that fatal pre-dawn morning all those years ago. Tenderly, he wipes the blood from her lips, leans forward and kisses her forehead.

Klaus turns to the witch. "Are you ready?"

Bonnie shakes her head. "No, we don't need to go back." She scans the area—the unnaturally rolling hills, barren of any trees, the scorched soil and damp air. "We're in Bulgaria, right?"

Beside him, Elena nods.

Bonnie purses her lips. "Katherine was the same. Wouldn't stop until we came here." She eyes Klaus. "To your village. Where Tatia was sacrificed all those years ago… And through that sacrifice, where the doppelgangers were created." The witch closes her eyes and frowns. "I can feel it, here. The land retains the memory of that day. This place is still powerful."

"Powerful enough for what?" Klaus asks. He's intrigued, but he does not wish to show it.

Bonnie gives him a feral grin. "Powerful enough for me to channel that memory, to fuel the sacrifice. Similar to how I first channeled the dead witches in order to stop the sacrifice. We don't have to go back to your witch. I can do it here."

"Is the memory really strong enough to channel though? And what of the spell, hm? I don't want to botch this with an inexperienced witch."

Elena fists her hand in his sleeve. "The memory is strong enough," she tells him. "I can feel it, vibrating in my bones. It pulled me here from across the sea—it will be enough." She studies Bonnie for a long moment before offering her a smile. "And I know Bonnie can do it. I've never seen her fail." Elena steps out from behind him, and reaches for Bonnie's hands. "I have faith in you, Bonnie." The two women hold each other's gaze.

Klaus looks away. He's never been good at looking too long into Elena's eyes. "And then I suppose," he says, looking into the distance, "that I must have faith in you, Elena."

"Klaus," Bonnie calls, breaking away from her friend. "I'm ready to begin." She squeezes Elena's hand once more before drawing a knife from her belt.

He wonders, as the Bennett witch draws the blade against Elena's pulse, if she had given herself to him so trustingly when he had been the one slipping razored edges into her skin.

Bonnie chants under her breath, words older even than he pulsing through the air.

The air pressure drops, and the blue lightening streaks against the clear sky. It's the feel of magic—left to run wild the last few years, finally answering to a master.

If this works, if the natural rhythms of the Earth return, there may be a future for his girl other than a life spent in eternal hunger, consuming his blood just to hopelessly feed it back to him. He is paying the highest price possible for that slim chance. He hopes it will be enough.

Elena bleeds out quietly, like water lapping down a drain, like a girl who is too used to the feeling of death creeping into her limbs, of hot blood streaming down her skin and turning her insides cold. Elena bleeds out, and Klaus watches her die.

 

* * *

 

The sacrifice ends when the last of Elena's blood has left her body.

She had died sometime before then.

At the first tremble in Elena's legs, Klaus had stepped forward to hold her steady. When they had given out, he held her close while Bonnie continued her work.

Now, he sets her down on the Bulgarian earth to which she had so insistently returned, and he waits. He squats next to her, watching the breeze shift her hair. Inside her, his blood is already working. Changing her, repairing her, turning her into a different sort of monster altogether.

Beside him, Bonnie sways on her feet. She has not yet confirmed whether the sacrifice was successful, but either way it is done. From the grey coloring of her face and the irregular beat of her heart, Klaus knows she will not survive this night.

"Do sit down, Bonnie. No need to strain yourself."

"I'm alright."

He raises his eyebrow at her. "You'll only hasten the inevitable by pushing yourself like this. That would be tragic. I imagine Elena will want to see you one last time before you go."

With a huff, she sits herself next to his girl.

Together, they wait for her.

The sun rises higher. By mid-morning, Bonnie asks, "Should we move her out of the sun?"

"Are you up to moving?"

"For Elena? I'll manage."

Together, they return to the cottage he had found for Elena only the night before.

Klaus settles her in the bed while Bonnie takes a seat in an old rocking chair in the corner.

"It won't be long now," she says.

He does not ask her for whom.

The sun sits lower on the horizon, and shadows grow darker within the cottage. Klaus looks out the window.

"Funny, I had expected the changes to be more immediate."

Bonnie stirs from her chair and wanders toward the bed, closer to Elena. She strokes her hair out of her face. "Give it time, Klaus. I felt the spell go through me—I felt it take everything from me. It worked."

"Then I'm sorry that you will not be allowed to see it." To his surprise, he truly is.

He can smell Bonnie's tears from across the room, and yet, when she speaks, there is a smile in her voice. "It's enough for me that Elena will. And… I think that it will be enough for you too."

Klaus cannot help but return her smile. "We're odd bedfellows, you and I… but I think had things gone differently, I would have quite liked you."

Bonnie wrinkles her nose. "Odd bedfellows. Nothing makes 'em like the end of the world."

The sun sets.

 

* * *

 

The first thing she feels are hands combing back her hair. She is lying on a bed, her head in a lap. She breathes, and her caretaker's scent brings her back to her childhood—Friday night sleepovers, baking cupcakes, talking about boys at first, and later magic spells and comets and floating feathers in the air.

 _Elena_ opens her eyes, and with a sweeping rush realizes _how good it is_ to know herself again.

Above her, Bonnie smiles down weakly.

"I was beginning to think you'd never wake up."

It has never felt so good to hear someone's voice. Not _ever_.

Elena sits up and throws her arm around her oldest, dearest friend.

She almost lets herself believe that they will be happy now, that there is a way out of this that will not end with her tears and one more person to mourn.

It's when Elena pulls away that she sees it. The look in Bonnie's eyes—it's the same look she remembers from the night Sheila Bennett opened the tomb.

"Bonnie?" Elena asks. Her voice breaks over the syllables.

"I'm here, Elena. I'm here." Bonnie pulls her into another hug that she never wants to leave.

There's a teary warble in her voice, but she asks nonetheless, "Isn't there something we can do?"

Bonnie shakes her head. "This is what I want, Elena. I've… made my peace. After so long, I just want to be with my Grams." Bonnie bites her lip and looks away, shoulders heaving under the weight of her sadness, her loneliness. It's an expression Elena has seen more times than she could count. The motion of it is etched into her heart. "I just want to be with Jeremy," Bonnie whispers, like this is the secret that could break them.

There's nothing for it then. "Stay with me then. Stay with me as long as you can."

It's only after she says this that Elena becomes aware of Klaus, standing far behind her, giving the two of them the space they need. Through everything, he had said nothing to interrupt. _How different he is_ , she thinks.

They stay up late into the night, pressed against each other. Klaus remains huddled in his corner, silently watching— _waiting_. The hours pass. Bonnie slips closer to the edge. Her words slow, her breath catches and jumps. Through it all, the thrumming pain behind Elena's eyes, the feverish aches in her limbs, grow worse. Unbidden, Stefan's voice arises in her mind—from a night another lifetime ago, when he'd told her about the night he'd turned.

_It's our bodies, pushing us to feed. To complete the transition._

Klaus plucks her thoughts from her. "It's nearly time, love."

Elena shakes her head. She wants to tell him _no—_

Bonnie cuts her off. "It's okay, Elena. You can let me go." She glances at Klaus, for the briefest of seconds, and it's a testament to the times that her tone holds no reproach when she tells her, "I know that you'll be safe, and I know that you'll be loved. That's enough." Carefully, she pulls out her knife and slices her wrist. Her task finished, she lifts her bleeding wrist to Elena, and twines her other hand's fingers together with Elena's. "Now let me save you, Elena. One last time, let me be your friend."

Hesitantly, she presses her mouth to Bonnie's pulse. The flutter is so weak she can barely feel it.

"I love you," she mouths into the skin, and drinks.

 

* * *

 

It's a few hours before dawn when Klaus helps Elena bury Bonnie. She's dissatisfied with the grave marker, but comforts herself knowing that at least Bonnie _has_ a grave. So many of those she loved do not.

The night air _buzzes_ in ways Elena has never noticed before. She can hear insects burrowing in the ground, wind gliding over hills, and in the distance, far, far away, the sound of running water. Faintly, she recalls these same sensations from when Katherine had first been turned—but those memories are growing hazier by the moment. Soon, she thinks, they will be gone. Relieved as she is, she is also sad. All those memories—precious memories—of Stefan and Damon, gone forever. Elijah's smile—the real, kind smile, not the one he had given her in Mystic Falls just to humor her. And Niklaus—the human boy her ancestress had fallen in love with, burnt up and gone. Elena could hardly recall the sound of his laughter as he chased her through the woods.

"The sun will be up soon, love," Klaus murmurs in her ear. "Best be heading inside."

Like she has so many times before, Elena leaves the grave, and with it the tired ache of grief. She could let it rest, at least for today.

Elena holds his hand with both of hers. "I don't suppose you have a daylight ring waiting for me, do you?"

Klaus's mouth twists. "An unfortunate deficiency in the plan, I'm afraid. Might take some work to find you a lapis lazuli."

Elena really wasn't expecting any differently. Still, she'll miss the sun on her skin.

Klaus takes her inside and leads her to the bed.

She shakes her head. "I'm not tired."

The corners of Klaus's mouth twitch. "Neither am I."

They negotiate like they always have—with tongues and lips and teeth, and the feeling of his skin pressing so closely into hers that she thinks they may be sewn together. And yet there is something different about the way Klaus moves against her, within her, above her—about the way he moves _her_. Perhaps it could be as simple as the difference between being a vampire and a human, but Elena thinks it goes deeper than that.

Klaus does not touch her like his possession, his hostage or his plaything. He touches her like a man who almost drowned, and found breath at the last minute. When he speaks, it is _her_ name he says, over and over, a deluge she cannot tire of.

_Elena, Elena, Elena._

He says her name, but she hears what he really means.

 

* * *

 

She runs into Caroline by chance years later, outside a café in northern Spain.

Elena cannot tell who is more surprised to see whom.

Nearly a century has passed since their last encounter—a century in which the sparse remaining humans on the planet have staggered toward repopulation, and the vampires have all been too wary of starvation and Klaus's retribution to do them _too_ much harm. Towns like this one are still very new, situated in places where the soil is good where once it was poor, where the water breaks through the earth where once it barely trickled. In flourishing, quiet little towns like these, Elena can almost pretend she never felt the earth shake on its axis, that she was never present on the battlefield that morning so many years ago. Klaus makes a point of finding these places for her, and she never tires of them.

Caroline hesitates when their eyes lock, and Elena can tell she is weighing in her mind upon who it is she is looking at. Finally, with only a trace of hesitation, she calls, "Elena?"

Elena smiles and bridges the distance between them. She folds her arms around Caroline and holds her tight against her heart.

 

* * *

 

Caroline takes her back to her apartment above the café. It's a small three-room affair, with a balcony overlooking a cracked earth street below. Afternoon sunlight pours in through the windows and catches the lapis lazuli glittering on Elena's finger. It had taken Klaus almost two decades to find a stone for her daylight ring. Absently, Elena clenches her fingers at her side as she remembers what it had felt like to feel the sun on her face again after twenty years of shadow.

She glances around the room. Caroline is in the back room pouring tea. Elena can see sweaters and dresses discarded through the bedroom's open door, can smell Caroline's floral shampoo in the air. The entire space—it's pure Caroline. _Only_ Caroline.

"I don't have any milk—I know you preferred it that way—but the tea's good, I promise—"

Elena takes the tray from her. "Nothing goes better with tea than good company, Caroline."

Caroline smiles. "And there's no better company than old friends."

Elena takes a sip from her cup. Caroline's right—it is very good tea. When she puts her cup back in her saucer, she notices Caroline staring at her, intent and bird-like.

"Have you been living here long, Caroline?" she asks.

"Only a few months. I don't like to stay anywhere long, unless I find something to keep me anchored." She drums her fingers on the lip of her cup. "And you, Elena? Are you just passing through?"

"Yeah, I think so. That's… that's probably for the best."

"Because of Klaus."

Elena had forgotten Caroline's nearly supernatural ability to get right to the heart of the most difficult matters. It felt surreal that she ever could have ever let it slip her mind.

"Yes, because of Klaus. But… probably not for the reasons that you're thinking."

"Yeah," her old friend says, voice quiet. "I can believe that."

For a moment, Elena worries that this moment will be spoiled, just like how their great escape was spoiled so long ago. But then Caroline grips her hand and squeezes, and Elena knows that they are too far past those days to worry.

"Are you by yourself?" Elena asks after a few moments.

"Yes. Usually. Sometimes." Caroline shrugs.

"And Tyler?"

Caroline—beautiful, seventeen forever Caroline—drops her gaze to the still brown liquid in her tea cup. "Dead now for the last twenty-two years. I stayed with him…" She bites her lip. "I stayed with him until the end."

Over the years, Elena had fantasized about running into Caroline and Tyler again. Just one more time, so that she could see the people she had loved from her home once more. As the years went on, the idea had seemed like a slimmer and slimmer chance, but she had still held on to the fantasy. How strange, that Tyler should have slipped away while she was still dreaming about him.

Elena places a hand on Caroline's shoulder. "I'm so sorry, Caroline."

The blonde looks up.

Elena's surprised to realize there are no tears in Caroline's dark blue eyes, only a steady, wistful smile on her lips. "Don't be, Elena. We were _happy_."

And suddenly it's all okay. Everything she has done, everything Klaus has done, all because, somewhere out there, there exists a world where Caroline Forbes and Tyler Lockwood lived a long and happy life together. Because, against every odd imaginable, there exists a world where a Petrova-born Elena Gilbert and Niklaus are happy, and can continue to be happy, possibly… _forever_.

 

* * *

 

_When everything is said and done and dead, Elena and Klaus are the only two left standing._

_She sees him across the field, a figure emerging from the pre-dawn mists like a primordial battle god, daubed in the blood of his enemies._

_He draws nearer as he stoops to examine the rent bodies strewn across the blood-soaked earth._

_Elena herself would be unable to pry her own eyes from the two at her feet, were the instinctive fear she felt at his mere presence not keeping her attention riveted to the angelically beautiful demon before her._

_Klaus pauses on the last of the bodies longer than he did on all the rest. It's not regret that plays across his features, but perhaps the feeling is somewhere in that family. He reaches out and freezes a hair's breadth from the face. His arm goes slack and drops across his knees as he continues to stare._

_Finally, he abandons the corpse and, for the first time, addresses Elena. "How is it," he drawls with faint reproach, "that in all this,_ you _survive?"_

_The hand curling in the mud next to her ankles draws her attention. She kneels down next to it, ghosting her fingers just above the limb. She memorizes its features, the almond shape of the nails, the exact webbing of skin between the digits._

_A shadow blocks the light._

_Hazy as the morning sun is, she can no longer make out the hand's features with Klaus's dark silhouette looming over it._

_Elena glances up into her old nightmare's eyes, notices the way the irises swim like golden islands in a swamp of black._

_There's no clear answer to his question. Before, perhaps she could have told him_ , My friends protect me _. But now…_

" _Luck, I guess."_

_She holds his gaze for a long minute before he slowly nods._

_He turns to leave but pauses, as though reconsidering. He looks back at the tableau she presents, and sighs. "It's a pity that you didn't stay dead like a good girl. I wouldn't have had to go through all this trouble that way."_

" _I didn't think—" she begins._

" _You're a lucky girl, Elena. Let's just leave it at that."_

_This time, when he turns away, he makes no indication that he ever intends to look back._

_Elena scrambles to her feet._

" _Wait."_

 

* * *


End file.
